How we used the internet to tell the story of the internet

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Late in the summer we began a project to tell the story of the internet using the internet - that is, asking you what you considered important. It is published today as an interactive people's history from that first Arpanet connection in 1969 (between Charley Kline at UCLA and Bill Duvall at Stanford, both of whom were video interviewed by technology correspondent Bobbie Johnson) to the events of 2009: most significantly - I think - the use of YouTube and other social media to bring footage of the Iranian democracy protests to the outside world after the Ahamadinejad government had forced out the international press and TV.

And there was plenty in between. As the project went on, it struck me the switching on of Arpanet was the mirror image of 1969's other big technological event - the moon landings. While the moon landings were the subject of enormous attention at the time and today, not a great deal developed from them. There were no Mars landings, for example. Arpanet attracted the attention of very few - says Kline: "It was neat that it was working ... but nobody recognised that it was the beginning of something" - but what would develop from that first connection has had a huge influence on how we live today.

The development was not just the work of Arpa-funded computer scientists. Bulletin boards, Usenet and simple chat functions were also parents of the internet today. The interviews include people who put the technology to new uses - Dave Hughes, who turned the bulletin board to political purposes in Colorado Springs in the early 1980s (Roger's Bar), or Richard Bartle at Essex University who co-created multi-user online gaming (MUD) in the late 1970s.

Thanks too to other interviewees: Peter Kirstein at UCL, who, in difficult circumstances, connected Britain to Arpanet in 1973; Howard Rheingold on the early days of online communities; Nigel Titley on connecting British Telecom to the internet (without his superiors really wanting him to); Philip Edwards' tale of spam at the first school online in Wales; Ellen Buddle on being a teenager in the chatrooms of 2001; Dean Whitbread on podcasting; and Dave and Valerie Goodman, who met on Flickr and, when they married, were celebrated by the site as the first Flickr wedding. A lot of it is the story of people trying things out - and finding that they worked, sometimes better than they expected.

Finally, thanks to everyone who helped us tell the internet's story, many of whom are quoted in the interactive people's history.