Post-Modem: The Interwebs Explained

By Jason Klamm

You know absolutely nothing about The Internet, even if you think you do. Whether an expert or a "newber," Post-Modem is guaranteed to tell you something you would have never known about The Internet without picking up this book. How did housewives in the 50s combine a turntable and a HAM radio to get Wi-Fi? What is the connection between "Mad Men"'s Jon Hamm and AskJeeves? (hint: you might want to ask Jon Hamm!) Is Richard Dawkins real? How did Stalin create the first LOLCat via Sputnik? Post-Modem is the unabridged, unedited history of the Internet you've always needed.

Rob Kutner (The Daily Show, Conan) says: “With an inspired mix of real historical texture, ballsy anachronism, countless whip-smart jokes, and spot-on ‘archival photos,’ Jason Klamm spins a delightful John Hodgman-esque look at the Internet throughout history and today.”

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: May 4, 2023
• ISBN: 9781312598003

Book preview

¹

For Jen

Post-Modem:

The Interwebs Explained

Foreword

By the Author, Jason C. Klamm, B.A.

A

s a long-time Internet Veteran and historian, Internet’s past and development are of particular interest to me. This book, however, is by no means to be taken as the authority on the history of Internet, but rather as a, or some history of it.  It is important to remember that there are conflicting accounts of historical events going all the way back to the days of The Bible, so it should perhaps not be surprising that, in an era defined by information, it is nearly impossible for us to gauge which of that information related to internet history is true, and which of it is false.  This is an historical human problem, one that I am not prepared or willing to tackle or repair all on my own.

That said, I have gone to certain lengths to keep my research as sanitary as possible.  My research model is based on a belief I have long held – that the only way one can research the Internet is ON the Internet itself.  After all, how else did historians ever research books?  By looking in other books, of course. 

In addition to this book’s lack of original research, I am taking advantage of what is generally known as the Observer Effect, whereby, in science, the act of observing certain objects and effects actually affects the data gleaned from said object or effect.  Internet is much the same way, equally fragile and fickle, so that by recording information about it, I am actually changing Internet in the process, especially in cases where community-edited sources allow me to do so.

If you learn nothing else from this book, at least take from it that any one person can affect history if they are willing to take the time to change the perceptions of those around them.  Whether that change of mind results from strongly-worded, logical discourse, or simply the amendment of that same discourse as stored on some sort of digital repository, doesn’t matter.  What matters is that Internet allows us to make these changes – thusly, it empowers us.

Naturally, that power can be all too tempting.  In writing this book, I haven’t given in to the temptation to simply make up facts.  Where facts were sparse or non-existent and necessitated expansion based on analogous stories, histories were aggregated from the most likely candidates for truth, thereby creating a patchwork of honesty not unlike Internet itself, which many historians have likely analogized as a quilt at some point.

Each and every perspective is taken into account, provided those perspectives find a considerable platform or voice on this, our most precious of informative media.  When it was found necessary to truncate or entirely eradicate certain pieces of information from this book (believe me, it wasn’t easy, but it was necessary!), my own process mimicked that of Internet’s Anarchist Democracy, whereby votes are only cast, and discussion only had, in order to disrupt the flow of information and to prevent Internet from becoming too informative.  It is not, and has never been, my intention to make this history excessively edifying; whenever possible, my research stops just short of inquisitive to avoid reflecting any personal or professional bias.

Let us not forget, however, that Internet is exciting!  It is unlike any other resource at our disposal, since it is all of them! It is my goal as an author and historian to bring you the experience of the internet, as presented through the eyes of its progenitor, the printed word.  This book should reflect the exact experience of hearing Kirk Douglas telling you about how proud he is of Michael’s work in 2003’s The In-Laws.

Sincerely,

Jason C. Klamm, B.A.

theauthor AT postmodembook DOT com

Post_Modem_InternetReceptor

A Man shoots Internet into a Receptor Pod (1942)

Post-Modem: The Interwebs Explained

Chapter 1

The Internet

W

WW.el.com/e to The Internet – all of the world’s information in one place, then separated into billions of pages dedicated to relaying that information – often repeating it, ad nauseum, ad infinitum, ad Latineum.  This book is intended not only as a resource for the modern NetUser, but as research for those who will one day examine the history of the internet.  Future generations, as they sit in their comfortable libraries, will have the option, we hope, to look in the aisle labeled Internet and pick up a book based on their favorite web page, perhaps updated in real time.  Mixed in with these InterBooks, I predict, will be real, physical, paper books – like this one.  And the future reader – maybe that’s you? – will perhaps think to themselves "I wonder what the internet used to be like, before the Amish enslaved 80% of the planet."  And wonder he/you will/are no more.  The past of the internet will be at his disposal, whenever he cracks the book open.  And our predictions of the future?  Well, he might well have a good laugh at how well we used our imagination.  Or he might solemnly bow his head at the sobering truth of our estimation that nearly every brain-implanted modem caused grand mal seizures, perfectly synced-up to the MIDI file playing on the last web page the implantee visited.  And all because Firefox’s latest version hadn’t passed WindowsBrain’s LOGO testing.

Your author has been an avid user of the internet since the days when it was still a simple recreational tool.  An historian, I use the internet as a constant source of inspiration in my research.  Though I vet the information in my books personally at the country’s largest libraries, I do my best to mimic the results and accuracy I regularly find on my favorite search engines, understanding that speed, and knowing that the right information exists somewhere, are the keystones of good research.

Collectively, I have 16 years of Internet experience, first as a user, then as a web designer, then a giraffe-designer for one of the earliest online visual chat communities, and finally as a tenured Search Engine Optimization Specialist at Yahoo!.  When I began this book in 2009, however, I realized that, even with all of these experiences and sufficient qualifications, there is still a great deal I don’t know about the internet, especially its history.  I wrote this book to pass that knowledge on to you.

To understand the internet, we must first define the term, as it exists, in its purest form.  There are many words that are used as nicknames or shorthand for the internet when, in fact, many of those nicknames refer to something else.  If we remain ignorant of what internet truly means, we will never be able to understand its history, and we will remain doomed to repeat it.  So now, for a frame of reference, the definition of Internet:

INTERNET(n.) (\ˈin-tər-ˌnet\) IN-ter-nET: The web. (:\ˈweb\)

Despite many claims to the contrary, the Web and the Net (the first slang term for Internet, etymologically-linked to the way in which the Internet pulled people in like a net

²) are exactly the same thing, because they both equally enable us, in the words of an early web scholar, to control what’s on the TV.

³

The mistake of discerning between the two comes from the earliest days of cyberspace, when, in fact, the WWW and the Net were separate entities.  The World Wide Web controlled all information in the world.  Make no mistake – all of the information available to every human being on the planet was controlled by the World Wide Web.  If you forgot your social security number, you had to ask the World Wide Web.  If you needed to remember your address, you also had to go there. The Internet, on the other hand, only controlled SOME of the information available – mainly MIDI files and animated gifs of sparkling stars as background images for web pages that read Welcome to my place on the internet!  I hope you enjoy your stay!

The internet, in a way, was the World Wide Web’s filter, keeping out unnecessary, uninteresting information, unless that was the information that random users chose to post on Bulletin Board Systems (BBS) and personal web pages.

INTERWEBS

The truest of names for what we now call The Internet, the Interwebs was the earliest attempt at an internet/world-wide-web hybrid.  It was, however, incredibly unstable due to the mixing of popular and important information.  When information about the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in 1914 began to appear on pages that also analyzed the social impact of The A-Team, servers would regularly crash, and the Interweb’s inherent value was regularly questioned.  It would be the late 1990s before the two could be seamlessly and irreparably commingled, and the promise of Interwebs realized.

INFORMATION SUPERHIGHWAY

As the beta version of the Interweb was being developed, many previews were leaked to the media, who erroneously referred to the infant technology as the Information Superhighway, Infobahn and DataCuldesac, mistakenly believing that information would travel from house to house via space-age couriers in high-capacity trucks, as they had in the early days of the Net.

⁴ The public outcry following a 1988 article in the US News and World Report entitled Information Superhighway: Paving Over the Future did so much damage to the development of the initial coding and network design that the programmers had to go underground, and hired various PR firms to re-brand the tainted internet as something that couldn’t but be spun in a positive light.  Thus was the birth of the short-lived Zappy!, a marketing ploy and the grandfather of the internet nonsense trademark that resulted in little more than piles of unused off-orange t-shirts with fluorescent puffy-painted pictures of computers on them.  The marketing firm was eventually fired, and the internet remained underground until America Online broke the market a year later.

CYBERSPACE

The coldest region of the internet, this is where many German soldiers were sent during WWII as punishment for poor performance.  When the US and other governments implemented the analog-to-digital changeover in the mid-seventies, Cyberspace was one of the first regions to find a home online.  It is now the domain of cyber-sex and cyber-bullying – a wholly undesirable corner of the Interwebs.

WORLD WIDE WEB

An expansion of the www prefix to most websites, World Wide Web was the reverse-acronym, or set of words coined when the original builders of the internet (likely members of the Electric Masons

⁵) wanted to add a sense of purpose to the arbitrary key-slapping that was used to program the first Web Sight, called so because it could easily be seen by the naked eye.  Other suggestions tossed around were Who Where Why, alluding to the web’s potential to find people’s whereabouts and Walla Walla, Washington, a comical suggestion by prominent Net Physicist Gemma Horvath.

‘NET (Later Uses)

An early government proposal circa 1979 suggested a formation of a truncated, abbreviated version of the internet intended for mass-consumption, allowing the average user access to only certain websites and certain batches of information.  Furthermore, companies who paid a premium could allow or disallow sites that disagreed with their moral compass

⁶ from being accessed by their users, regardless of membership level.

Such a plan was eventually voted down, however, as Senator Pulp Foreman (D – IL), the proposal’s author, was found to clearly be suffering from dementia.  The Senator himself was summarily voted down, as well, and was given a living Viking funeral on the Potomac River, a request that had been included in eleven of the Senator’s past thirteen proposals to the Senate.

WI-FI

Standing for Wireless Fidelity, Wi-Fi is a term generally used to cover any internet access provided without a hard-wire connection. Though originally part of the early internet lexicon, it wasn’t until the late nineties that the term – and, eventually, the technology – found a rebirth in the country’s rekindled desire to surf upon the Interweb.  The term’s origins in print can be found in an advertisement from a 1957 issue of Good Housekeeping in which housewives, the magazine’s core readership, were prompted to Enjoy the smoothness and tone of RCA’s Wi-Fi cabinet, going on to suggest a certain resistance to cup-ring stains that was an oft-touted feature of the first Wi-Fi sets.

Post_Modem_WiFiManual

Cover of 1957 RCA Wi-Fi Manual

Use of the earliest Wi-Fi cabinets was fairly limited and time consuming, given the lengthy procedure outlined in the RCA Wi-Fi Manual (pictured above).  After placing the Call-Up phonograph on the turntable, the early Wi-Fi user then turned on the broadcast feature on the included AM radio, sending a short-wave signal to the user’s portable transistor radio (not included in the basic set), which, when the radio’s speaker was placed to the receiver of a phone, sent a signal to the local telephone operator, indicating that the user wished to access the internet (in the manual’s example, Klondike5-8037), and the operator, trained to recognize the whine of the tightly-orchestrated internet sounds, (as presented by famed composer Bernard Hermann) would call up a local television broadcaster with the user’s first inquiry.  In this case, the housewife dials in a request for Chinese laundry, using her rotary dial, and watches her television screen (set to Channel 1⁷) for the name of the nearest laundry, the address and phone number, and a delightful (in those days!) impression of what the manual refers to as a Kind old Chinaman, that the local Internet Man puts on for the housewife’s entertainment.

Naturally, this early combination of manual and automatic inputs caused a number of problems, primarily if the user’s request was mis-dialed or, as was more often the case, if the dialed search term was mistaken for another.  Not since Morse’s Code and the first Pony-Only Pony Express operations had technology created such possibility for significant misunderstanding.  Perhaps the most famous of these Miss-Dials as President Eisenhower once referred to them⁸, was that of one Ms. Dora Hewlitt, Stanford, Connecticut.  Upon dialing in 2-6-2-8-5-2-6-2-3 (the proper numbers for ambulance), Miss Hewlitt’s local operator sent her prompt, if hasty, translation to a Mr. Cameron Laurie, Stanford’s most popular Inter-Man, who, after taking a puff of a Chesterfield and flipping casually through his desk-side phone book, faced the camera and famously asked Miss Hewlitt What, my dear, is a Coat Lance?"  This drew quite a laugh from Laurie’s camera man and from Laurie himself, who then went on to do his impersonation of a Chinese person, something he had come to perform, due to its popularity, after every search result.

By 1958, the Wi-Fi service, which accounted for 9 out of 10 household Internet experiences,⁹ was proving its superiority over wired internet which, at this point, was still largely telegraph-based.  Not only were the services easier to understand and use, but the entertainment value was greater, allowing consumers to control every aspect of what they saw on television.  Says Net Historian Salman Gourd:

"This was the beginning of a true revolution – one that didn’t see itself truly realized until just a few years ago.  People were finally given what they had been asking for since the earliest days of radio – the opportunity to get up and interact with the people that were being paid to bring them their free nightly entertainment.  They were no longer restricted to sitting on their plush, comfortable couches and easy chairs, passively receiving an entertaining variety of relaxing programs - now they could be active, involved watchers, getting up out of their chairs and physically calling up the operator and telling them about something they read about in the paper