History of Art: Net Art
Online resource by Thomas Dreher outlining the backround to Net Art from the 1960s onwards, from the design concepts that would make modern computing possible to examples by artists who explored what art could be created by this new technology – sample quote below:
In the sixties Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider and Douglas Carl Engelbart conceptualise the interface between humans and computers as a cooperation of several participants using the same “intelligence augmenting tool” 4 for operations with “symbols” 5: to store character strings, to retrieve documents from the memory, to process these data and to store the processed data. 6 A keyboard and an electronic pen or a mouse are the means to process characters presented on a monitor. With these means functions can be easily activated. 7 Computers formerly used as calculators can be used with these forerunners of menus´ icons dominantly to process text and graphics.
The website is very simple Web 1.0, but an interesting primer on the subject (and is part of a wider History of Computer Art).