HIST 390-001 The Digital Past Fall 2013

Here are some tools that make adding a bookmark to Diigo easier. Particularly recommended for new users is the "Diigolet," which you can drag to your Bookmarks bar ("Favorites" in some browsers) and use to quickly share links with the group by clicking "Diigolet" then "Bookmark" then "Share to group."

As the title says, this is the oldest site online. It uses hypertext and uses links within the text to browse information. It is a very basic, black and white site that really shows how far we have come since then.

That is great, Stephanie! ibiblio.org is one of my favorite sites -- it's run by the library and information school at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and it has a fair amount of tech history. It's similar in some ways to archive.org. I'm curious: how did you find it?

I actually found it through a BBC article a few months back. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-22652675 The site I posted is not the original but is a copy of the original that Tim Berners-Lee kept.

Can't resist sharing this -- found it from Stephanie's "Oldest website on the Internet" link. Great short history of the web. "http://first-website.web.cern.ch" Note that it links to the "first" website at http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html , which is not the same as the "oldest" one that Stephanie linked to -- I think the one Stephanie posted was a demonstration site, but not a "real" site, so I agree that it's older. :)

A full, handy reference for HTML and CSS. Allows you to try out the code in the browser.

Definition of a LAN, with pictures. The Internet can be thought of as a network of LANs.

There is information here covering everything from keyboard shortcuts to virus protection. There is even information about physical hardware protection.

That's a great site, James -- definitely some useful info there, and it's very clear. I like that there's a Computer "Word of the Day"! Wish it had an RSS feed or Twitter account. :)

This link gives information on the difference between a directory and a folder. The reason I found this link so useful was because it outlines the difference between the two for Mac and PC users.

Congratulations, Gordon, on being the very first to post! :) I will say I'm not very impressed with the link, though -- it's a bit fuzzy on whether there is or is not a difference between a directory and a folder, except in a technical sense on Windows Vista. (I'd argue that in general there isn't, though I grant you there are special cases.) And you can't tell who wrote that piece, and it comes from the support database of a particular software company rather than from a site that's dedicated to explanations / teaching / learning / education. At least Wikipedia is deliberately trying to educate people, and it's better on this issue, I'd say, and provides a clearer argument that a directory is something structural in an OS whereas a folder is a visual "metaphor" for a collection of files, which may or may not be an actual directory: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_(computing)#Folder_metaphor

I've added a new avatar for our course Diigo group. It's based on a 1974 map of ARPAnet, the first "network of networks," and thus the precursor of today's Internet. I got it from Wikimedia Commons, which is a great source for all kinds of media that you're allowed to reproduce on the Internet.

The New York Times website is down today (by some reports it's because Syrian hackers have attacked it), but here's a (probably illegal) copy of a helpful column on "Tech Tips for the Basic Computer User" by the New York Times's technology reviewer, David Pogue. This documents also contains all the comments. All 1149 of them. :) Many of those comments have helpful tips as well. Even though this was published in 2008, it's still helpful.

Wikipedia page about the History of the Internet that I showed in class. Note that the first Internet connection (really, the first ARPANET connection) was made between UCLA and Stanford -- most early work on the Internet was done at universities and was funded by government grants. It was only after the launch of the Web in the early 90s that businesses began devoting resources to the Internet and the Web.

 The World Wide Web Consortium's definition of the difference between the Web and the Internet is understandably technical. It annoys me that there's a typo in which "TCP/IP" is misspelled "TPC/IP". Way to confuse people. 

A timeline of the Internet (with portraits!) from the Computer History Museum. This timeline begins in 1962 and ends in 1992 with the invention of the World Wide Web -- or, rather (though I'd say it's the same thing), with the 1992 invention of the first web browser, Mosaic, at the University of Illinois.

An article often cited as "inventing" the web, or at least the idea of it. Vannevar Bush worked in information intelligence during the Second World War, and his work in that field led him to conceive of a better way of finding and managing information. I don't know that the web has really solved that, though!

This book, Digital History, exists in print form as well, but it is entirely available for free on the open web. It is written for historians who want to "go digital," so you as undergrads (and not necessarily History majors!) aren't exactly its audience, but the book is nevertheless excellent as an introduction to the underpinnings of the internet and the web.

This animated video is British, and that affects some of its perspective (Internet history books will tell you more about the American side), but it's particularly good for showing the structure of the Internet.