ishistory Series

History of the Internet

From ARPANET to the algorithm — the complete history of the internet.

Episodes

Parts

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Part 1 of 5 · 7 episodes

The Foundation

Prehistory

Before the Internet

Telegraph, telephone, and the dream of a global network — the long prehistory of connected communication that made the internet inevitable.

1 min read

Cold War

ARPANET

The Cold War military project that accidentally invented the internet — and why its creators had no idea what they'd built.

1 min read

III

Engineering

TCP/IP & the Protocols That Built the Web

The invisible rules that every device on earth follows — and the two engineers who designed them over a single afternoon.

1 min read

Communication

The Birth of Email

How the first killer app changed communication forever, and why its inventor sent the first message before anyone knew what email was.

1 min read

Infrastructure

DNS: The Phone Book Nobody Thinks About

The hidden system that translates human-readable addresses into machine language — and what happens when it breaks.

1 min read

Infrastructure

Fiber Optics & Undersea Cables

The vast physical infrastructure of the internet: thousands of miles of cable on the ocean floor carrying almost all of the world's data.

From radio waves to wireless everywhere — how a courtroom settlement and an Australian engineer gave the world wireless internet.

1 min read

Part 2 of 5 · 6 episodes

Going Public

VIII

Web

The World Wide Web vs. The Internet

Clearing up the most common misconception in tech — and the story of Tim Berners-Lee's proposal that his boss called 'vague but exciting.'

1 min read

Web

The First Browsers

Mosaic, Netscape, and the race to make the web visual — how a group of college students turned a text-based system into something anyone could use.

1 min read

Business

The Browser Wars

Microsoft vs. Netscape, bundling, and the antitrust battle that shaped the modern web and nearly broke up the world's biggest software company.

1 min read

Business

The Dot-Com Boom

Billions of dollars, outrageous valuations, and the wildest gold rush in history — how the internet made everyone briefly believe the rules of business had changed.

Why it all collapsed, who survived, and what the wreckage left behind — including the seeds of everything that came next.

1 min read

XIII

Infrastructure

Broadband Changes Everything

From dial-up to always-on — how high-speed internet transformed not just how fast pages loaded, but what the internet fundamentally was.

1 min read

Part 3 of 5 · 12 episodes

The Web We Know

XIV

Business

Google

How two Stanford PhD students and a mathematical formula became the internet's front door — and then became the internet itself.

1 min read

Culture

Wikipedia

The impossible encyclopedia that actually worked — and what it says about human collaboration, knowledge, and the open web.

1 min read

XVI

Culture

Online Communities & Forums

From Usenet bulletin boards to Reddit — how the web learned to talk to itself, and why anonymous communities became both its best and worst feature.

Napster, BitTorrent, and the copyright wars that forced every media industry to reinvent itself — or die trying.

1 min read

XVIII

Social Media

The Rise of Social Media

From Friendster to MySpace to Facebook — the strange, competitive early history of the platforms that rewired human social life.

1 min read

XIX

Social Media

YouTube & the Video Web

When anyone could broadcast to the world — how three PayPal employees built the platform that replaced television for an entire generation.

1 min read

Business

Online Shopping

Amazon, eBay, and the slow-then-sudden transformation of retail — and why almost everyone said it would never work.

Netflix, Spotify, and the death of physical media — how Silicon Valley dismantled the music, film, and TV industries and rebuilt them in its own image.

How the iPhone rewired everything — the shift from desktop to pocket and what it meant for attention, design, and power.

Why the open web gave way to walled gardens — and what we lost when the internet became a collection of locked platforms.

1 min read

XXIV

Culture

Memes & Internet Culture

How the web developed its own language — from early image macros to viral culture, and what memes reveal about how information spreads.

How Amazon Web Services came to own the internet's backbone — and why a bookseller became the infrastructure company that everything else depends on.

1 min read

Part 4 of 5 · 7 episodes

Power & Politics

XXVI

Security

The History of Passwords

Security's weakest link from the very beginning — the surprisingly long, consistently troubled history of trying to keep people out of things online.

The battle over who controls internet speed — the policy fight that sounds technical but is really about who owns the future of communication.

Cookies, tracking pixels, and the ad-tech machine — how the internet's business model turned user attention into the world's most valuable commodity.

1 min read

XXIX

Security

Cybercrime & the Dark Web

The internet's criminal underworld — from early hackers to ransomware gangs to dark web marketplaces, and the cat-and-mouse game with law enforcement.

1 min read

XXX

Policy

Government vs. The Internet

Censorship, shutdown, and the Great Firewall — the long struggle between states that want control and a network designed to route around it.

1 min read

XXXI

Policy

Wikileaks, Snowden & Digital Whistleblowing

When the internet exposed the state — the leaks, the fugitives, and the permanent change to how we think about government secrecy.

1 min read

XXXII

Social Media

Twitter's Rise & Fall

The platform that changed political communication — from Arab Spring to presidential tweets to Elon Musk's takeover, and what it all means.

1 min read

Part 5 of 5 · 5 episodes

What It Became

XXXIII

Business

The Platform Era

How a handful of companies came to own the internet — and the consequences of letting a public resource become private infrastructure.

1 min read

XXXIV

Society

Misinformation & the Attention Economy

How the web learned to radicalize — the algorithmic incentives, the engagement loops, and the slow realization that the internet had changed democracy.

The dream of a decentralized internet — blockchain, Bitcoin, NFTs, and the enduring question of whether trustless systems can actually replace trust.

1 min read

XXXVI

AI & the Next Web

How machine learning is reshaping everything online — search, content, identity, and what an AI-native internet might actually look like.

Spatial computing, the open web movement, and the internet's unfinished story — where it goes from here, and who gets to decide.

1 min read