The usual history of the Internet begins with this diagram. Those four machines, the dedicated long-distance phone lines connecting them to one another, and the “interface message processors”-computers dedicated to the task of routing information across the network-represented the entirety of the Internet in 1969. The circles represent four institutions- UC Santa Barbara, UCLA, the University of Utah, and the Stanford Research Institute-while the boxes represent giant mainframe computers on their campuses. It was drawn in December 1969 and features four circles, four boxes, and four lines. There’s a diagram of the Internet that I show my students every semester. The welcome screen, created by Jim Lane, for ‘The Antenna Farm,’ a bulletin-board system (BBS) run by the early BBS designer Ben Thornton
