As I wrote to Shannon at the end of the year, pretty much all I do now is look for maps, look at maps, and dream about maps. And so I will (if that’s OK – maybe Shannon wants to keep this site as a record of the class only and not have it continue forever) continue to post map- and map-like-related things to the site.
I thought everyone might appreciate this map of the original internet. I remember writing a paper about the internet in high school (ca. 1995) mostly related to censorship/obscenity laws and how they impacted the use of the internet (a notable case at the time was the inability for people in libraries to look at things like Michelangelo’s ‘David’ via the internet because nudity is obscene); however, I also got interested in the origins of the ‘net as a government/military/scientific research project then called “ARPAnet”. It mainly linked research universities and military facilities so that people could (very slowly) share data related to their research.
Here is a map of the original nodes (note how they are not cities but universities and military installations):
Incidentally, this map comes to us via LIFE, which seems to be putting its extensive image archives to good use (also check out the interactive timeline-creation tool).