You're listening to an Airwave Media Podcast.

This is the Useless Information Podcast.

I am Steve Silverman.

Useless Information. information.

Today's podcast is very different from all the previous episodes.

You see, I'm leaving Charlotte to Schapert on an eight-day student trip to Costa Rica and I realized there was no way I could

finish the next story before I go.

And since it'll probably be a couple of weeks before I get the next podcast completely

recorded, I decided to put together a podcast of material that I had

lying around. You know, you can call this a bonus episode.

Now the first segment is an interview that I did back in January of 2014 with Lena Silesen, and that's when she was working on her master's degree at Columbia University.

She told me that she had seen my first book at the university bookstore.

She was intrigued and then contacted me to see if I'd be interested in being interviewed.

She made two trips up from New York City on a mega bus, that's at least three hours each way,

and sat with me for hours while asking me questions and watching me do what I do while I put

these podcasts together. Then after the interview is completed, you'll be a witness to history and hear an NBC radio broadcast of the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor.

It is the real recording. So let's get started with the

interview that Lena Silesen did with me back in 2014. The internet was

invented all the way back in the 1960s as a communications tool for scientists.

But it was only 20 years ago that the network, as we know it today, became accessible to the general public.

And even then, the earliest users were mostly people with technical skills,

working in research institutions.

...