A little late, but it’s technically still the weekend right?

Here are a couple of pieces on the history of the Internet, or at least facets of Internet related technology, from Ars Technica:

“Cutting the Cord: How the World’s Engineers Built Wi-Fi” by Iljitsch van Beijnum and Jaume Barcelo. It gets a bit technical, but I’m not sure how that could be avoided in telling this story.

and

“Before Netscape: The Forgotten Browsers of the 1990s” by Matthew Lasar: Before Netscape? How many people even remember Netscape? Interesting retrospective complete with screenshots.

“The Grand Map” by Avi Steinberg at Paris Review: You’ve probably heard about the driverless cars that Google deploys to gather street-view images for Google Maps, some of you may even have seen one. But what else do these indiscriminate eyes gather into their field of vision? Quite a bit, and a good deal of it is decidedly not pleasant. Fascinating, but be advised some images lean toward disturbing.

“The Consequences of Writing Without Reading” by Buzz Poole at Imprint. Title pretty much describes the piece. Nice reflection on the reading, writing, and solitude in a media-rich age in which solitude is viewed as a punishment of sorts. “Wanting to write without wanting to read is like wanting to use your imagination without wanting to know how.”

And finally, a couple of Infographics:

“7 Disruptive Innovations that Turned Markets Upside Down” from the folks at Mashable: Borders on providing a bit too much information, but otherwise an interesting, compact take on Google, Netflix, Pandora, and four others.

“Google and Your Memory” from the staff writers at Online Colleges. A representative of Online Colleges emailed me about their well-conceived and balanced info-graphic after coming across my recent post, “Don’t Offload Your Memory Quite Yet.” Take a look.