---
title: "My latest project: Web Development History"
date: 2021-01-09
author: "Richard MacManus"
featured_image: "https://ricmac.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/netscape_featured.jpg"
categories:
  - name: "Notes"
    url: "/category/notes.md"
tags:
  - name: "Web Development History"
    url: "/tag/web-development-history.md"
---

# My latest project: Web Development History

This week I launched a new website: [Web Development History](https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/). As the name suggests, it’ll be an ongoing chronicle of internet history — but from a development perspective. Most internet history books, websites, podcasts, etc, are from a business perspective. What’s missing, I believe, is an internet history with a technical point of view: which products were developed, the technologies used, how the web has changed over time, developmental trends, and so on.

Simply put, I want to describe how the web *actually works* and how that has evolved over the past 25-30 years. Actually I’ll also cover some pre-web history too, such as Douglas Engelbart’s innovations and influential pre-WWW software like Apple’s HyperCard.

My ultimate goal is to turn this website into a book. One of the reasons I’m writing it as a blog first is to gather reader feedback along the way. Web development is a deep, wide and sometimes complex subject, so the more eyes that review the material before I turn it into a book, the better.

A quick note on the structure of the site. I will be taking a chronological approach within topics. So for example, JavaScript is a big topic and I will tackle it in a series of chronological posts starting from 1995. At the same time, I may start or re-start work on other topics (e.g. exploring the history of cloud technology on the web, starting with Amazon Web Services in 2006). The upshot: although each topic will be covered chronologically, the blog will jump around the web timeline to keep things interesting.

The first two posts are up now, so I encourage you to check them out and subscribe for future posts:

- [1995: The Birth of JavaScript](https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1995-the-birth-of-javascript/)
- [1996: JavaScript Annoyances and Meeting The DOM](https://webdevelopmenthistory.com/1996-javascript-annoyances-and-meeting-the-dom/)