Ancient Web: Keith Lynch Dated Internet Vocabulary From His Own Mail

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

When did people start talking about 'netiquette,' 'home pages,' or 'spam'? Keith Lynch had an unusually personal way to investigate: search his own saved Internet correspondence.

Read Keith Lynch's timeline of net-related terms

Lynch says he had collected almost three gigabytes of email and network news, stretching back decades. He compiled a chronological list of when terms first appeared in his archive, not a dictionary of when they were first coined anywhere.

That distinction makes the project more useful, not less. It is a window into the changing vocabulary of someone who was actually there, complete with events and misunderstandings that later histories tend to smooth away.

An Internet seen from the inside

The timeline begins in June 1975 with the MSGGROUP mailing list. It records MUD in June 1980, Usenet appearing in his ARPANET material in August 1981, smileys in November 1982, and netiquette in March 1986.

Then the vocabulary begins accelerating. Lynch records Gopher in January 1992, Mosaic in June 1993, web page in May 1994, JavaScript in December 1995, and wiki in February 1996. The entries include passing products, address formats, jokes, hoaxes, and now-forgotten Internet service providers.

Some of the funniest inclusions are also historically meaningful. A story about a rocket-powered Chevrolet in 1990 is explicitly labeled false; the dynamited-whale story is marked true. The infamous 'September that never ended' appears in his 1994 list. These are not merely technologies but the language of communities talking to themselves.

The page says the first version of the timeline was made in December 1996 and gives its last update as August 27, 2006. A related spam timeline follows that problem's evolving terms and responses.

It has also been noticed outside personal-web circles: the Internet Society's Internet-history resource list links Lynch's chronology among references for exploring Internet history.

The important caveat is Lynch's own: some terms circulated long before he encountered them, and early Internet and Usenet communities were not initially the same place. His earliest instance is evidence about his collection, not a universal first use.

The page is Internet history in the form of a personal index card box. You can follow a word through the decades, while remembering that a network was made of people before it was made of familiar brand names.

Browse the full vocabulary timeline and the companion spam chronology.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.