NSF and the Birth of the Internet: a website review

NSF and the Birth of the Internet is a special report from the U.S. National Science Foundation combining text, graphic, and video resources.

• http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/

The presentation begins with a spectacular introductory video splash that loads automatically. Low connection speeds or heavy local network traffic may delay downloading and display of audio-video elements. There is a prominent link that you can use to skip the splash.

The report itself covers contributions from various domestic parties involved in network development from the 1960s to the 2000s. Video-recorded interviews with three main contributors are accessible immediately following the splash. However, the central organizing scheme of the report is a time-line, in which each decade tab in the viewing frame covers up to half a dozen resources presented as menu buttons in the main viewing window.

Most resources covering the middle years (1970s-1990s) are short interview segments featuring people involved in technological and organizational developments. Most of the interviewees are male.

Text sidebars explain graphic selections and introduce video segments. Back and next buttons on resources when actually displayed would facilitate navigation without returning to decade menus. Transcripts are available for video segments, but replace videos and sidebars in the main viewing frame.

One auxiliary window in the viewing frame displays corresponding increases in numbers of network users and data transfer rates as you browse through the decades, while the link in another, which overrides the main video links displayed immediately after the splash, in turn over-rides both the main viewing window and decade tabs with schematic maps of U.S. network growth from 1969 to 2007.

Using the conveniently located close button on the maps returns you to your previous view of decade menu resources. There is also a separate list of resources, including PDFs and Wikipedia listings, accessible both through the report frame, and in text-only view:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/resources.jsp
http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/textonly/related.jsp

The NSF site is accessible in text-only format, however it might take some time to find a corresponding location, such as this special report, from the top level of the site if you use the text-only link in the page footer outside of the report itself, rather than the one inside the special report viewing frame:

http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/nsf-net/textonly/index.jsp

I am grateful to George Siemens for his recent pointer to this interesting, government-funded report. I gather he gleaned it from Ray Schroeder's Educational Technology blog (Siemens, elearnspace, 2008.08.20). In the end, I'm wondering what individuals and organizations in the rest of the world were doing during the period of time covered by the NSF's special report.

Image source:
http://www.nsf.gov/images/logos/nsfe.jpg
(22 KB JPEG format)
Note: "No special permission is required from
the National Science Foundation to reproduce these images"
(http://www.nsf.gov/policies/logos.jsp, 2008.09.08).
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