Former AOL boss Steve Case virtually fled to his Hawaiian pineapple farm after the AOL-Time Warner merger he engineered in 2000 vaporized much of the group’s combined market value. Now that Liberty Media chairman John Malone is open to swapping his 2.8 percent stake in Time Warner for AOL’s dial-up business, the extent of Case’s heroics on behalf of AOL shareholders has become clearer.

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Fifty years ago, in response to the surprise Soviet launch of Sputnik, the U.S. military set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency. It would become the cradle of connectivity, spawning the era of Google and YouTube, of Amazon and Facebook, of the Drudge Report and the Obama campaign. Each breakthrough—network protocols, hypertext, the World Wide Web, the browser—inspired another as narrow-tied engineers, long-haired hackers, and other visionaries built the foundations for a world-changing technology.

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