Stories

Longer reads on how the internet grew up: the people, the companies and the strange little moments that shaped it. Every story lists its sources.

Long before websites, people dialed into each other's computers one phone line at a time. A blizzard helped start it.

The screech, the static, the busy signal when Mom picked up the phone. A short history of the modem.

For ten years, registering a .com cost nothing. Here is how a few hundred technical addresses became the most valuable real estate online.

A failed Atari game service, a $200 voice recording and enough free discs to fill a landfill. The story of AOL.

In 1989 a physicist at CERN got tired of losing track of information. Twenty months later, info.cern.ch was online.

Before Google, finding something online meant knowing where it was. Here is how the web learned to search itself.

Netscape had three-quarters of the browser market four months after launch. Six years later it was gone.

Two missing digits, more than $300 billion in repairs and a New Year's Eve the whole world held its breath for.

Free homepages, "under construction" GIFs and street addresses for websites. GeoCities was the web's first big neighborhood.

Between 1995 and March 2000 the Nasdaq rose about 600%. By October 2002 it had given all of it back.

A college student's side project let tens of millions of people share MP3s for free, and the music industry has never been the same.

YouTube started as a dating site idea in an office above a pizzeria. Eighteen months later, Google bought it.