22 stories tagged internet-history, newest first.
30 points by jruohonen | 9 comments
A 1998 essay by Stefan Wray describing the Electronic Disturbance Theater, its FloodNet tool, and the theory and practice of Electronic Civil Disobedience.
15 points by rdmuser | 10 comments
Fog-Bank project page explaining how it captures and archives every frame from FogCam, the oldest running webcam, including its pipeline to YouTube and failure tracking.
60 points by peter_hansteen | 13 comments
Christie's online auction lot listing for a framed printout of the first packet sent via the RFC 1149 avian carrier (carrier pigeon) Internet protocol, April 2001.
235 points by adunk | 97 comments
56k.rip is a website that recreates the 1996 dial-up internet experience; the capture shows only a solid teal screen.
347 points by compiler-guy | 189 comments
TechCrunch article reporting that Vint Cerf, known as the 'Father of the Internet', is retiring.
500 points by pentagrama | 318 comments
A Tedium essay looking back at old-school online web forums and arguing for bringing back small, imperfect community forums.
1043 points by ca98am79 | 558 comments
Medium post by Mike Carson describing how he acquired the defunct Friendster domain for $30k and his plans for it.
410 points by canucker2016 | 180 comments
Tom's Hardware article recounting the 1988 Morris worm, which infected about 10 percent of the internet within 24 hours and sparked modern cybersecurity.
354 points by ani_obsessive | 133 comments
Animation Obsessive newsletter post telling the story of stick-figure fight animations made in Flash, plus animation news.
441 points by nowflux | 395 comments
A Wreflection newsletter essay comparing the current state of AI to the dial-up era of the internet in 1995.
378 points by anarbadalov | 179 comments
MIT Press Reader article recounting the history of Tor, from its origins as a US military research project to a widely used privacy and anonymity tool.
520 points by Bogdanp | 223 comments
Tim Dierks' 2014 blog post explaining how Netscape-Microsoft browser war politics led SSL to be standardized and renamed as TLS.
582 points by mikerg87 | 117 comments
Neal.fun's Internet Artifacts, an interactive museum-style exhibit of notable objects and moments from internet history.
2166 points by bewal416 | 311 comments
Blog essay about the 2009–2012 iPhone "Send to YouTube" feature, which uploaded videos with default titles like IMG_0416.
![Screenshot of pmarca.substack.com: The story, as best I can remember, of the origin of Mosaic and Netscape [video]](https://hn.urlbox.com/shots/renders/2024/6/28/be408d00-a220-49f6-b30a-7b5834820350.jpg)
359 points by kjhughes | 130 comments
A video post on Marc Andreessen's Substack in which he recounts, from memory, the origin story of the Mosaic and Netscape web browsers.
335 points by luuurker | 285 comments
TorrentFreak article marking 25 years since Napster's 1999 launch and its influence on piracy and later streaming services like Spotify and Netflix.
358 points by sysoleg | 140 comments
SSH Academy page from ssh.com explaining SSH ports and the story of how SSH was assigned port 22.
469 points by throwup238 | 351 comments
Zach Holman's humorous 2014 blog post reminiscing about 1990s web development tricks like nesting blink inside marquee tags.
635 points by todsacerdoti | 62 comments
Vint Cerf's post to the ISOC Internet-history mailing list announcing that Dave Mills, creator of NTP and the Fuzzball routers, died on January 17, 2024.
508 points by Khaine | 292 comments
A Tell HN discussion thread noting that Bash.org, the long-running archive of humorous IRC quotes, has gone offline.
389 points by Someone | 135 comments
Homepage of nic.funet.fi, a Finnish FTP archive serving freely distributable files since 1990 and the site where Linux was first released in 1991.
706 points by en3r0 | 366 comments
Farewell page for Legit Torrents, a legal torrent tracker run from 2005 to 2023, explaining its shutdown after a null route and looking back on its history.