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"Since the mid-1960s John Brockman has been at the cutting edge of ideas. He is a passionate advocate of both science and the arts, and his website Edge is a salon for the world's finest minds"

It took me almost 16 years to retrieve and digitize video footage of the late American graphic designer Paul Rand. As an undergraduate student at Art Center College of Design (Europe)* in Montreux, Switzerland, I got introduced to Paul Rand and his wife Marion during a hot and dry summer in 1994. Since I was studying both the basics of film and graphical user interface design, I was asked to shuttle Paul Rand around and to document his visit on campus and his lecture that included a presentation and video (interview with Steve Jobs) about the creation of the NeXT logo.

Our interactive people's history of the internet brings together your stories, alongside our own research and video interviews with key figures

"'An obligation to systematise success' Randi Weingarten, attorney, educator and president of the 1.5 million-member American Federation of Teachers spoke with Marilyn Achiron during an afternoon at OECD headquarters. This is a continuation of the conversation that was posted on 30 November 2011."

"In 1991 a Yale professor David Gelernter envisioned a lot of what we now do on the Internet. Future computing, he thinks, may be organized around a concept called 'lifestreams.'"

"A tiny number of ideas can go a long way, as we've seen. And the Internet makes that more and more likely. What's happening is that we might, in fact, be at a time in our history where we're being domesticated by these great big societal things, such as Facebook and the Internet. We're being domesticated by them, because fewer and fewer and fewer of us have to be innovators to get by. And so, in the cold calculus of evolution by natural selection, at no greater time in history than ever before, copiers are probably doing better than innovators. Because innovation is extraordinarily hard. My worry is that we could be moving in that direction, towards becoming more and more sort of docile copiers. MARK D. PAGEL is a Fellow of the Royal Society and Professor of Evolutionary Biology; Head of the Evolution Laboratory at the University of Reading; Author Oxford Encyclopaedia of Evolution; co-author of The Comparative Method in Evolutionary Biology. His forthcoming book is Wired for Culture: Origins of the Human Social Mind."