And every prediction of the future is bound to be wrong, either a little or a lot. These were the grains of salt I was taking as I recently skimmed the archives of probably one of the most interesting and appropriate of Net history projects, the Community Memory Discussion List on the History of Cyberspace. With a nicely resonant touch, the list has been named after the original Community Memory Project in San Francisco, dating back to the early 1970s. The Net, of course, precedes that BBS and any other, but it's worth noting that almost immediately after the core of what was to become the Net was up, up popped the urge to apply this new technology to form a community, to personalize, humanize it. That urge was to manifest itself at the very beginning, when the handful of computers that were the original nodes of the Ur-Net were quickly being used to exchange personal messages, email's ancestors, more often than what they were intended to be used for, namely, supercomputing along a sort of government sponsored time sharing program.
Every narrative necessarily begins in medias res.
So if you tend to view the Net as just another step in the development of telecommunications, you go back to Alexander Graham Bell and start from there. I need you. Poetic as this scenario would be, Bell's phone of 1876 was actually antedated by the one developed fifteen years before by one Philipp Reis, a German physicist. As early as 1858 cable technology had advanced far enough to give the Atlantic cable a try - it didn't really work until 1866, but once it did, it was operational for nearly a hundred years, providing a link between Europe and America a lot faster than your typical 28.8 bps modem of today. Nevertheless, that tidbit does add a shade of historical depth to the art of flaming.