The geography of the internet

When reading Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet, I realized I didn’t know as much about the origin of the internet and computing as I would like. One night, I got into the Timeline of computing. As a big fan of cultural evolution theory, I thought it would be cool to look at the geographic spread of computing technologies (and perhaps augment it with all the information contained within Broadband). So I wrote a small observable notebook for visualizing the evolution of computing/internet, directly extracted from the timeline.

It is still a work in progress. I find it hard to visualize the underlying patterns just from the world map. I added the emergence of the Arpanet, but the range filter is a bit clunky. The first few years of the Arpanet were easy enough to map, then it gets a little bit out of hand (obviously).

Anyway, it was a fun little project. I might come back to it at some point.