This Podcast Is An Interactive Project

The 20th anniversary of the Internet Era as we know it is this year, 2014.

I know, the Internet was invented long before, and even the web was born a few years previous… but 1994 was when Netscape was founded. And I think we can all agree that Netscape, and the Netscape IPO represent the birth of the Internet Era (in capital letters) as we’ve all lived through it the past decades.

Realizing that made me want to read a book that summed up the Internet Era. The only problem was, no such book existed. There are books on the birth of the Net and the birth of the Web… and there are certainly dozens of books about individual companies or individual people from this era. There are also a handful of good books about the dot com era by itself. But there is no single book that ties together the entire Internet Era as I experienced it in my professional life (more about me here) from Netscape through the present day.

So, I set out to do the research and record the oral histories that will (hopefully) someday make that book possible.* Because I want this project to be fruitful for posterity, all interviews and oral histories I record will be posted un-edited. Any “chapter episodes” I write, in the nature of Dan Carlin are for context only, and will use existing sources that I will meticulously provide bibliographies and sources for.

What we’ll get out of this is hopefully a comprehensive history of the Internet Era, put together by the Internet as a community, including the voices of those who lived it and did it.

We currently have a regular monthly audience approaching 55,000 listeners, and are regularly in the top 20 of iTunes (technology) podcasts. Thanks to you!

* Update: That book will now come out in Spring of 2018, published by Liveright, a subsidiary of W.W. Norton.

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Learn more about what inspired this project here.