This week I launched a new website: Web Development History. 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: