The Birth of the Internet

A heroic epic by Gregory Weston (a fragment)

‘Twas the year before Nixon’s first Midterm,

And Arpa’s Virginia home was asquirm.

Glum Frank Heart is no longer dejected

‘Cause LA and Stanford are connected.

No surprise there, how could one be forlorn?

A packet-switching network just was born.

‘Twas modest at first, surely you could show,

But a exponential pace did it grow.

Such speed! Who on earth ever could have known?

My wager will be: Jeanne Dixon alone.

Now fast forward to 1993,

And you’ll surely be shocked at what you see.

A paltry safeguard in case of the bomb

now houses the likes of playboy.com

How’d this happen? The poet will discern.

It all began at a large lab called CERN.

The scientists there lacked a protocol

To send their great studies to one and all.

Those scientists wanted text with graphics,

But FTP and Gopher both lack pics.

What they needed was an http

That could be viewed by a Mac or PC.

Hypertext could supply what they had bade,

So the World Wide Web Consortium was made.

The Web? Just a tiny interloper.

Or so thought U Minn, proud home of Gopher.

That protocol, lording o’er port 70,

Was ready to rule the ‘net completely.

Yes, before Gopher’s horrendous decline

Magnificently did the mammal shine.

With its ally WAIS, anyone could find

The products of many-a great men’s minds.

Or current satellite weather photos,

Or a library that will never close,

Or at a large site like the one at Rice,

Find recipes for SPAM that’ll oft entice.

On Gopher one could check a Thesaurus,

Get the blue-book price of a Ford Taurus.