The Computer as a Network Node
While digital art of the 1980s still revolved substantially around the screen and computer-generated image production, focus shifted in the 1990s from the individual machine to the networked system. In place of the computer as image machine came the computer as node in a global communication space. The technical preconditions of this shift reach far back: from the ARPANET of the late 1960s through the introduction of email by Ray Tomlinson (1971) and TCP/IP protocols (from 1983) to the Minitel, widely used in France from 1982. The decisive turning point, however, was Tim Berners-Lee's development of the World Wide Web from 1989 onward. Only with URL, HTML, and hyperlink did a generally accessible, navigable information space emerge, one transformed by browsers such as Mosaic and Netscape into a visually shapeable realm. Stewart Brand's Whole Earth Catalog (from 1968) and Marshall McLuhan's vision of a global village found, in the emerging network, their first concrete technical embodiment.