I wonder what a field guide to the old internet would look like. Here are some things I might include if I was writing such a guide: All-time top stories on r

I wonder what a field guide to the old internet would look like. Here are some things I might include if I was writing such a guide: All-time top stories on reddit in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20060415194256/http://reddit.com:80/top?t=all https://web.archive.org/web/20060415194256/http://reddit.com... reddit was originally a bit of a niche site for a tech audience, kinda like Hacker News. However, techies used over-represented on the internet anyways. "The internet used to be a lot more like HN" is generally a pretty decent first approximation. This is the reddit story which best captures the curiosity and wonder of its early days for me: https://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html https://www.garlikov.com/Soc_Meth.html Aaron Swartz's blog would be another thing I would include: https://old.reddit.com/domain/aaronsw.com/top/?sort=top&t=all https://old.reddit.com/domain/aaronsw.com/top/?sort=top&t=al... A few decades ago there was a strain of progressive techno-optimism which has all but died out by this point. "Information wants to be free", Creative Commons, excitement about Wikipedia, Clay Shirky, One Laptop Per Child, Obama hope & change. I think of Aaron as being the poster child for that -- both a hacker and a progressive activist, advancing internet technology because he felt like it would help us advance as a society. Another thing I'd point to is Eric S Raymond's stuff. He was one of the major pioneers of the open source movement: http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/ http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/ If you want a book to read, I've recently been reading a book "Because Internet" which includes a linguistic history of the internet, going back to the earliest days.