It's hard for me to imagine a better synthesis of network studies and its precursors than Johnston provides in this essay. The tail end of his essay is geared towards an exploration of artificial life, which is tangential to my own interests here, but the first part is a well-executed history. I can even forgive the phrase "network theory" considering its qualities.

Some highlights:

Stanley Milgram's original "degrees of separation" experiment and "small world problem" (882)
Erdos & Renyi on random graph theory (882)
Mark Granovetter on "strength of weak ties" (883)
Paul Baran on the security of distributed communications networks (884)
Bell curve v power law distributions (885)
(great ex from Barabási: highway v air traffic systems)
Barabási on scale-free networks (886)
Watts and Strogatz on small world networks (888)
Barabási: two laws of Web = growth and preferential attachment (890)
(means of accounting for both hubs and power laws in network)

I don't really have notes to add to this, because a lot of it is stuff that I'll be blogging here eventually. Johnston turns to the question/issue of the blurring of the machine/organism boundary when it comes to the Web, and eventually to artificial life. But if you want a capsule summary of much of the most important work in network studies in about 10 pages, this is probably the best I've seen so far.