100 words 054

In between publishing the Whole Earth Catalog and spinning up the Long Now Foundation, Stewart Brand wrote an article in Rolling Stone magazine about one of the earliest video games, Spacewar.

Except it isn’t really about Spacewar at all. It’s about the oncoming age of the personal computer.

The article was published in 1972. At the end, there’s an appendix listing some communal places where “one can step in off the street and compute.” One of those places—with 16 terminals available—was run by a certain Bob Kahn.

Together with Vint Cerf he created the Internet’s Transmission Control Protocol.

Have you published a response to this? :

Previously on this day

14 years ago I wrote Mobilism browser panel

Hats off to the conference, and hats off to the browser vendors who showed up.

23 years ago I wrote Attack of the Clones

I got my days mixed up yesterday. I’ll be seeing Attack Of The Clones sooner than I realised - midnight tonight.