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Vanity Fair has published a long oral history of the Internet entitled How the Web was Won, and based on interviews with a variety of notable folks. Here’s links to the single page versions of the article and a photo portfolio. If I had been interviewed for the article, my response would have looked a lot like this:

My first direct connection to the Internet was through my faculty office computer at Marquette University in 1993. I was a visiting assistant professor on a one-year contract, teaching business ethics and management courses.

The main Internet service that I remember using at Marquette was Gopher, a text-based system that used menus instead of hyperlinks. In some ways, it resembled CompuServe, which I had used since 1981. CompuServe was a well-organized walled garden that had a nice variety of content, while Gopher was a rag-tag distributed network of university computers and a few commercial servers.

I became familiar with BITNET while I was at the University of Georgia. Both systems offered portals to Internet services. The first items I ever purchased through e-commerce were a Shriekback CD on CompuServe in 1987, and a Dead Runners Society t-shirt from a listserv in 1990.

In early 1994, the university installed a demo workstation that ran Mosaic. That was the first time i accessed the World Wide Web on a graphical browser. Later that year, I built my first web page, and I’ve had a presence on the web ever since.

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I’m spending some time this week importing some of the better articles from my old blogs. Before I installed WordPress here on billso.com in January 2007, I used Bloglines.com.

The blogging tools that Bloglines provided left a lot to be desired, however. In fact, that user interface hasn’t changed very much in the last 2 years. It is very difficult to export these old articles to other systems.

My old articles were posted to Bloglines during 2005 and 2006, and I’m tired of supporting links to a legacy system. But I didn’t want to lose my articles from the October 2006 earthquake.

I am keeping the time-date stamps for these old articles, and I am adding an imported category to my content management system (CMS) here at billso.com. Each of these old articles includes a link to the original Bloglines URL, so that Google and other search engines can find the new locations.

Wikipedia is celebrating its 7th anniversary online today, according to Wired. Here’s a link to Wikipedia’s article on the site’s history.

I’ve written about Wikipedia’s reliability and authority before, and most of these articles can be found under this blog’s wikipedia tag. Here are three of the better examples:

• 7 December 2007: Wikipedia co-founder recasts his advice
• 24 November 2007: Citing Wikipedia
• 7 March 2007: Fake professor stops editing on Wikipedia

One issue I haven’t mentioned is how some commercial web sites like answers.com and reference.com repost the content of Wikipedia articles. John Seigenthaler learned about this practice the hard way in 2005, when a Wikipedia article about him was fact-checked.

One of my favorite blogs is Modern Mechanix, which posts scans of old articles from the Modern Mechanix magazine.

One of Sunday’s entries reprints a 1933 article on an automatic turn-signaling device for automobiles. If only American automobiles had such devices installed as standard equipment! Turns out some drivers are too lazy to use the signal, according to this 2006 survey. Others want to add adventure to their commute.