Valérie Schafer

In the Shadow of ARPANET and Internet: : Louis Pouzin and the Cyclades Network in the 1970s

During the 1970s, French engineer Louis Pouzin led a small team of researchers who designed an experimental packet-switching computer network they named “Cyclades.” Despite the technical successes of Cyclades—especially Pouzin’s “datagram” concept that was adopted by the American networking researchers Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn—the French authorities starved Cyclades by 1979 and split up Pouzin and his team. This article describes the opportunities that the Cyclades group pursued and the obstacles it encountered in its efforts to cooperate with peers in the United States, France, and Europe. Rather than squeezing Pouzin and Cyclades into a teleological narrative that seeks only to explain the rise of the Internet, the article suggests that its broader rubric of “networking history” allows historians to recover the political and human complexities of digital convergence—such as the bold words and disruptive work of Louis Pouzin.

Part of a Whole: RENATER, a Twenty-Year-Old Network within the Internet

Internet history cannot entirely reflect the complexity of the network of networks’ genesis and development if it does not take into account parallel or rival projects and national paths. This article shows how the study of a specific network, for example, RENATER (the French National Telecommunications Network for Technology, Education and Research, both a public interest group and a network born in 1993), can also shed light, in a detailed way, on Internet history. It seeks to demonstrate how this case study allows for a more nuanced picture of an “Internet-centric” and teleological vision of Internet history.

Hosting the World Wide Web Consortium for Europe: from CERN to INRIA

This paper studies the role that Europeans have taken in the governance of the Web and the factors influencing the emergence of a new governing body within Europe by means of an analysis of the transfer of the European branch of the new World Wide Web Consortium from the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) to the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control (INRIA) during the 1990s. In order to understand how INRIA came to hold this responsibility, it is necessary to consider the issue on many levels, examining national, European, and transnational ambitions with regard to Internet governance. The historical view taken in this article demonstrates the crucial importance of the initiatives undertaken by individual players, in addition to the technical and political issues. These issues are particularly critical at a time when Internet governance is more often the focus of researchers involved in defining it than of the institutions to which they belong.

Le mariage de raison du musée d¡art et du Web (encadré)

HERMÈS 61, 2011 La conquête de l’espace virtuel par les musées d’art français s’est faite en moins d’une décennie, malgré la crainte initiale de désacralisation de l’art et de baisse de la fréquentation. Les acteurs et les étapes de l’émergence d’une visibilité sur le Web permettent d’éclairer la relation des institutions muséales avec les technologies du numérique, mais également la redéfinition des liens avec le public et des stratégies de communication. Ce processus, qui commence dans les années 1990, est marqué par un important décalage entre les attentes initiales et les stratégies réelles, qui se concrétisent pas à pas en générant des savoir-faire et une adaptation des usages, aujourd’hui encore en mouvement.

Introduction: Internet histories

For more than four decades, the Internet has grown and spread to an extent where today it is an indispensable element in the communication and media environment of many countries, and indeed of everyday life, culture and society. These precipitous changes have called for the understanding of the innovations, actors, changes and continuities involved in these evolutions, from a technical, but also from a social, scientific, politic or economic point of view. Although the history of the Internet has not been yet very predominant within the academic literature, an increased number of books and journal articles within the last decade attest to the fact that Internet history is an emerging field of study across a number of scholarly disciplines and fields. This is most evident in Internet and new media studies, but also is clear in culture, media, communication and technology research, across the diverse settings and institutional locations where such work may be encountered. A central issue for the advancement of the field is that historical studies of the Internet have mostly been published in journals related to a variety of disciplines, and these journals only rarely publish articles with a clear historical focus. The situation has greatly improved with the various recent issues dedicated to Internet and web histories,

Behind the scenes: an interview with Pierre Beyssac

ABSTRACT Pierre Beyssac, who launched EU.org around 1995 and was the co-founder of Gandi, a French company which profoundly disrupted that countrys growing market of domain names, reflects on his path from the 1980s to the beginning of the 2000s. He was one of these discreet but central players of the French Web scene of the 1990s and 2000s, who experienced these tremendous times as a user, then as a “pro-am” and finally as a web professional.

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Notwithstanding Andrew Russells warnings within this first issue to refrain from adopting a hagiographic relationship to Internet pioneers and core actors – and definitely keeping them in mind – w...

The “Web of pros” in the 1990s: The professional acclimation of the World Wide Web in France

This article, focusing on France, explores the notion of a “Web of professionals” and seeks to establish its factual, epistemological, and methodological implications for the history of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. This research reflects on the promises of the New Economy and the roles of the various controversies, cultures, imaginaries, and forms of mediation affecting the business world in its appropriation of the Web. It also aims to reappraise the individual and collective stakeholders whose active part has been somehow underestimated or obscured by the image of the mass Internet user. The professionalization of Web activities, the development of a new generation of entrepreneurs and the conversion of business models to online practices are all significant parts of the emergent Web culture in France, as well as factors contributing to this emergence.

Biographie des auteurs

Maurice Aymard Directeur d’ etudes a l’ Ecole des hautes etudes en sciences sociales (EHESS) depuis 1976. Administrateur de la Maison des sciences de l’ homme depuis 1992. Historien de l’ economie et de la societe a l’ epoque moderne, avec une reference particuliere aux pays mediterraneens. Dernieres publications : en codirection avec Perry Andersen, Paul Bairoch, Walter Barberis et Carlo Ginzburg, Storia d’ Europa, Turin, Einaudi, 5 vol., 1993-1996 ; en codirection avec Claude Grignon et Francoise Sabban, Le Temps de manger, Paris, Editions de la MSH/Editions de l’ INRA, 1994.

Connecting Gender, Women and ICT in Europe: A Long-Term Perspective

Cross-analysing the problem of ICT with women and gender’s roles on a long-term perspective, as this collective book aspires to do, may seem challenging. As described in some pioneering historical works, the very notion of computing as a construct calls for a nuanced understanding. Great care is required to avoid amalgams that could introduce an artificial continuity that has no evidentiary basis between human computers, keypunch operators or today’s women labourers in computing (with all the diversity within the milieus of industry, public and private research, education, etc.). Therefore, creating a dialogue that includes diverse ICTs, diverse contexts and various European countries may make this all the more difficult. But the choice to embrace multiplicity seemed relevant from several angles that are discussed in this introductory chapter.