As I'm sure most of you know, late least year Google announced a new research tool known as the Ngram Viewer. (An n-gram is any sequence of items--in this case words--of length n; so a 2-gram would be any word pair). The tool was released in conjunction with the publication of a paper in Science that made use of it to explore the history of culture.

Polish-born engineerPaul Baran died this week in Palo Alto, at age 84. [Aside: the number of important figures in the history of computing who were born to Jewish families in Eastern Europe before World War II and later emigrated to the U.S. is quite astounding; computing must rival physics in this regard.] He is best known as one of the originators of communications based on "message blocks" (a.k.a packets), while working at RAND Corporation in the early 1960s.

Ars Technica has posted the last of three articles adapted from Johnny Ryan's recent book, A History of the Internet and the Digital Future (Here are the first and

The recent announcement of a planned merger between AT&T and T-Mobile here in the U.S. led me to compile a (rough and partial) time-line of recent mergers in the telecommunications industry (or at least a big chunk of it - I've ignored the cable industry, for example).

I'm pleased to share with the SIGCIS community a resource on Internet history that I was totally unaware of until a friend of mine sent me the link a couple of weeks ago: an oral history of the Internet compiled and edited by Vanity Fair magazine.

An interesting story appeared recently from Nancy Scola at The Atlantic on a little-known event in Internet history (yes, it was only 14 years ago, but in Internet Time, history started yesterday!)