In May 1995 the first social network in history was born and it was born in Italy. Perhaps the first. Who knows. But if you think that Facebook is from 2004, Second Life and MySpace from 2003, you understand very well the enormity of what I have just written. In 1995 the web was practically just born. On May 26 of that year he entered the history of technology as the “Bill Gates Internet Tidal Wave”. This is the famous internal memo in which the co-founder of Microsoft actually admitted that he did not understand the importance of the Internet. He wrote: “In this memo I want to make it clear that our focus on the Internet is crucial to our business. The Internet is the most important step forward since the introduction of the IBM personal computer in 1981… like the PC of that time, the Internet is now not perfect, but those who oppose it make the same mistake by focusing on the limits and not on the strength of the phenomenon ”.
Here, mark this date: it is May 26, 1995 and in Seattle, the genius Bill Gates, the man who was invading the world by putting Microsoft’s operating system on almost all computers, announces the wave of the web. Meanwhile in Italy someone is building a social network. Who? Claudio Cecchetto. Yes he, the author of Gioca Jouer, the inventor of Radio Deejay and another way of making radio. He was also an Internet pioneer. In May 1995 he launched a social network called Internetwork City, the city of the Internet network. It was built, one line of code after another, by a young programmer who, thanks to this story, would have become a brilliant digital communicator (he has long been one of the faces of Striscia la Notizia): Marco Camisani Calzolari. When he thinks back to those times, MCC gets excited: “It was a social network in all respects. A place where you could sign up, have a profile and talk to others. It was one of the first in the history of the web, and was invented by Claudio Cecchetto. He had thought it while surfing the Videotel, but then the world wide web had arrived. At the time I was working as a programmer for a fashion company: I had learned how to do it by downloading the instructions for writing code in Pearl and Java from the BBS that were on the net. At the time, Mosaic had just come out, the first real browser to surf the web: before everyone used Links with which you surfed the web without images, only text; and without a mouse, you used the tab key to move around the screen. Mosaic was a real revolution but at the time animating graphics was almost impossible. So I came up with a trick that exploited software errors… Today it’s hard to imagine what the user experience was like in those days but it worked, people signed up. Then Claudio moved the headquarters from his offices in via Melzi d’Eril, in Milan, to the Assago forum where he had installed Radio Capital. A awake kid had just arrived on the radio, Fabio Volo and Claudio decided that once a week he would dedicate a space to tell Internetwork City. Fabio asked the questions and I answered ”.
The experience lasted a couple of years, at one point Cecchetto also invented a virtual currency, the Energy Bank. But that’s another story. Who remembers Internetwork City?
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