Information Revolution! The First 50 Years of the Internet

Information Revolution! The First 50 Years of the Internet

By: Phil Youngblood, PhD

With the exception of the printing press, the way information was shared and stored two hundred years ago had not changed much over the preceding two thousand years. Then a series of discoveries and electrical inventions helped to connect businesses and individuals in new ways and enabled some to broadcast messages to anyone able to pick up their transmissions.

Still, even within my lifetime, with the exception of television broadcasts, information sharing was largely local or delayed or restrained to printed sources like it had been for hundreds of years. When I was born, there were no practical computers at all, let alone a computer that an individual could own. Even if there were, there was no way to connect them because there was no Internet, in fact no computer networks at all.

About 50 years ago (60 years, if you count the origins), all that began to change with the development of rules about how electricity could represent language and abstract objects, paired with the invention of transistors and their micro-miniaturization, advancements in transmission media and connectivity protocols, and the concept that connecting people around the world was too big of an idea to be possessed by any one nation or company.

Come learn about the first 50 years of the Internet, how it began as an idea, how it was realized, who owns it, who controls the technology, and the applications that we use to connect us to the world in both constructive and destructive ways that could never have been imagined decades ago.

A presentation by Dr. Phil Youngblood

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