October 1, 2002

"You can't stop technology. Even if they succeed in shutting down those particular services, new services will spring  up.  It's the nature of the Internet."

- Shawn Fanning, founder of Napster, in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.

"Napster creator ponders his legacy" by Nick Wingfield, October 1, 2002.

April 23, 1963

Memorandum For Members and Affiliates of the Intergalactic Computer Network

J. C. R. Licklider, the Director of Behavioral Sciences Command & Control Research at ARPA, distributes a memorandum that will often later cited as the origin of ARPAnet, the packet switching network that was the forerunner of the Internet, to his colleagues, "the members and affiliates of the intergalactic network." In the memo he outlines the challenges that would be presented in their efforts to establish a time-sharing network of computers with the software available.

February 2, 2001

"Welcome to the red light district of the new millennium."

- Law & Order: Special Victims Unit episode "Secrets," February 2, 2001. In the episode, a school teacher is murdered after a student discovers a classified ad in which she is seeking sexual partners. In presenting the classified ad to the detectives investigating the case, a police computer tech in the episode characterizes the internet as "the red light district of the new millennium."

January 4, 1996

A Serious Miscalculation

“…an Internet browser is a trivial piece of software. There are at least 30 companies that have written very credible Internet browsers, so that’s nothing… ”

- Bill Gates as quoted in
"The world according to Gates" by Don Tennant
InfoWorld Electric, January 4, 1996