Back to the future with the Internet History Podcast

I was feeling a little nostalgic last week, missing the days of the internet dial-up tone (go to http://iti.ms/2kWQTAp for a fix), Usenet newsgroups and IRC. (Are there any former PhishTank people out there? Hello!)

Anyway, I took to Twitter to reminisce and was told about this fantastic series that began back in 2014: the Internet History Podcast hosted by Brian McCullough. Podcasts are divided into three categories: chapters, interviews and miscellaneous episodes. Start with chapter one where McCullough discusses the first internet web browsers, Netscape Navigator and its predecessor Mosaic.

McCullough provides plenty of interesting historical details but also explains where the whole internet bubble began and how strange it was in the 1990s for a young technology company to have an IPO that led very quickly to a large valuation.

Netscape went public in August 1995 and by the end of trading on the very first day it was already valued at more than $2 billion, something unheard of at the time. An essential podcast for those interested in how the modern tech industry began.