And, it might be worth looking at the special issue Nancy Baym edited for The Information Society sometime in the Fall. It might help with the "discipline or not, that is the question" question. Ulla
Here is the URL for the abstracts from that special issue. There is not anything in there that addresses 'history' per se. But the consensus from the pieces as a whole is that it is not a discipline, and that 'internet studies' may not be the right name for whatever it is, so it certainly problematizes the question being asked by Norm's student. http://www.indiana.edu/~tisj/21/index.html#4 I will say that when I first went on the job market with an internet studies dissertation in 1994, very few people doing the hiring (in Communication) had any clue what I was doing or how it could possibly fit into their departments even if when thought it was very interesting. By 1996-1997 or so, job ads were starting to appear in Communication specifically looking for someone who did "computer-mediated communication" or communication and new technology. Over the next few years, the CMC term pretty much disappeared and new technologies, new media, information technology and other such monikers became very common. This is just one field, of course, and is quite different from the question of the creation of new majors, centers, etc, but is probably indicative that the emergence of something like a 'field' rather than isolated positions here and there was a late 90s phenomenon, although work was certainly being done prior to then. Nancy