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Introduction
Most of the current crop of histories of the Internet can be characterized as 'teleologies' or 'Whig history.' This is a style of writing that takes the present to be the end point toward which history has been inevitably unfolding (Lamoreaux et al. , 2004: 377). Teleological histories seek uncomplicated explanations, often based on a single cause for an historical epoch. In the case of Internet history, the epoch-making event is usually said to be the demonstration of the 4-node ARPANET network in 1969. From that single incident the global Internet developed. Examples of (otherwise carefully written) accounts that follow this approach are Salus (1995) and Hafner and Lyon (1996).
In this simplistic explanation, almost all of the networking activities that were simultaneously happening around the globe, commercial and non-commercial, have been written out of the story. The sense conveyed is that the Internet has grown like a tree. From a tiny acorn planted in 1969, we now have the giant oak of the global Internet. But a tree is the wrong metaphor. When the Internet took off in the early 1990s the world was covered by thousands of isolated networks and the integration of these networks into a global entity was likely to happen, whether ARPANET existed or not. A better metaphor is that the networked world was like a super-saturated salt solution. It just needed a single crystal of salt to make the whole change its state. As it happens, that crystal was the ARPANET's Transmission Control Protocol (TCP)/Internet Protocol (IP). But there were other protocols and technologies that could have established an internet.
This article attempts to fill out some of the missing narratives of Internet history, as far as this is possible in an article of modest length. We begin the story with the rise and fall of 'computer utilities' in the 1960s. These developments promised facilities that foreshadowed the Internet by 30 years, but which lay dormant until technology finally caught up in the 1990s. Although the 1960s dreams of consumer networks did not materialize, the 1970s saw the development of commercial networks on a global scale. We describe this largely hidden infrastructure, which enabled the electronic commerce that became commonplace by the 1980s - from automated teller machines...