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Title: Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet by Katie Hafner ISBN: 0-684-83267-4 Publisher: Touchstone Books Pub. Date: 21 January, 1998 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.54 (46 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: It leaves out the hype but tells a coherent history
Comment: This is one of the best books on the history of the Internet I have found. It doesn't make incredibly grandiose and silly statements and it is written in a very clear, straightforward manner. Focusing largely on the early days of the Internet, especially BBN's role in creating the original ARPANET, this book is a pleasant blend of character portraits and technical material, though it is somewhat light on the technical apsects. Still it spent less time than other computer history books on hiring and firing and other rather boring junk.
My only gripe with this book is that it peters out right about 1990 and flies over the modern Internet with too little detail. Perhaps that story is best told in a follow-up book.
I highly recommend it.
Rating: 5
Summary: ¿Wizardry¿ is an apt term
Comment: "Wizardry" is an apt term to describe the work of the many who laid the foundation for what we now know as the Internet. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon weave together the talents, personalities, idiosyncrasies, obstacles, and triumphs into a compelling and -- given the complexity of the Internet's development -- intelligible history. Hafner and Lyon tell of the work of engineers and researchers of Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a Cambridge-based computer company backed by the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), which ultimately connected computers across the country.
Readers of this book are spared excessive technical jargon and are instead are kept amused by the many lighthearted moments in the midst of perfectionism and high pressure to produce. This book gave me the context for understanding the hard work behind and rationale for distributed networks, packet-switching, and TCP/IP. I was intrigued by the "accidental" start of E-mail, which is one networking function I cannot do without. I was also inspired by the teamwork, passion and work ethic displayed by those involved, particularly because their intense focus often flew in the face of many detractors and disinterested parties who failed to appreciate the possibilities and usefulness of a distributed network.
The authors also describe the open culture that resulted from the collaborative work, which we see today. In contrast, the reluctance of BBN to release the source codes of the Interface Message Processors (IMP) was a harbinger of the intellectual property issues that would emerge in decades to follow.
So many players were involved in the creation of the Internet, that I found myself needing to back track to keep each person and his (all were men) contribution straight. Not a problem, though. The information in this book was fascinating. I found myself wanting to take my time to absorb as many of the details as possible.
Rating: 3
Summary: A good book about the history of the net
Comment: This book tells about how the Internet as we know it today has come into existence.
In February 1966 Bob Taylor who was employed by the Advanced Research Project Agency located in the Pentagon, was in charge of three non-networked computer terminals, each terminal running a different operating system. Communications between the terminals was at that point in time impossible. Taylor set out to explore a way to get the three computers to talk to each other.
The political climate at the time was such that the Russians have launched sputnik into space (1957). President Eisenhower began ARPA as a research and development agency to rival the Soviet's advances in technology.
ARPA's mission was to find a way for (government-sensitive) information withstand an attack (from the Soviets) on the Pentagon.
Paul Baran joined ARPA. He was working on a way "to build communications structures whose surviving components could continue to function as a cohesive entity if the other pieces were destroyed."
Baran diagramed 3 kinds of networks in a paper he wrote. The three networks were, centralized, de-centralized and distributed.
Baran had another idea. To send information over the network, he suggested that the messages themselves be fractured. This was formulated into packet-switching.
Special computers had to be constructed in order to uses packet-switching. The software form these computers was build by a company called BBN. The hardware of the machines known as IMPs was built by Honeywell.
In the beginning there were four nodes on the network. Over time the amount of nodes grew to 115 - until senstive government nodes claimed their own network, MIILNET.
Through funding, the National Science Foundation helped get many more colleges and universities on the network.
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Title: Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee ISBN: 006251587X Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: 07 November, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
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Title: The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop ISBN: 014200135X Publisher: Penguin USA (Paper) Pub. Date: 27 August, 2002 List Price(USD): $16.00 |
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Title: Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger, Michael Swaine ISBN: 0071358927 Publisher: McGraw-Hill Trade Pub. Date: 29 November, 1999 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: How the Web was Born: The Story of the World Wide Web by Robert Cailliau, James Gillies ISBN: 0192862073 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: 15 January, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Dealers of Lightning : Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik ISBN: 0887309895 Publisher: HarperBusiness Pub. Date: 04 April, 2000 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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