Redstone Rockets

I enjoy reading John Bullard’s History of the Redstone Missile System, although most people are likely to find it pretty dry. I found it linked from Jim Ryan’s marvelously informative site, which is a memoir of his Army experiences manning the Army’s Redstone missiles from 1958 to 1962. It’s a wonderful site to visit if you’re a hardcore rocket buff or cold war historian, although perhaps not much fun for those who couldn’t keep themselves awake in history class.

I think sites like Jim’s are the best thing about the World Wide Web. Computer professionals didn’t need the WWWeb to communicate with each other and organizations didn’t need the Web to move data – those needs were already met by the Internet itself, underlying the Web. But the Web lets people like Jim reach out to the whole world, not just computer gurus, with information that would never otherwise be available to many of the people most interested in it.