Stanford University artificial intelligence researcher Paul Martin created the distribute command “dead.dis@sail” to collate his lab’s email conversation about the Grateful Dead into a proto listserv. In early 1975, he made the mailing list semipublic by putting it on ARPANET—the U.S. Department of Defense’s experiment in communication protocols that would eventually lead to the invention of the internet as we know it—and researchers from other universities started joining.5 Martin programmed automatic news updates that crawled for information about the Grateful Dead and sent them out
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