where wizards stay up late by katie hafner

Ich hatte auf großartige Visionen und schrullig-exzentrische Anekdoten gehofft. Und dass die Vorgänge nicht überdramatisiert dargestellt werden. Man muss dem Buch zugute halten, dass es extrem detailliert recherchiert wurde. I gladly set this book next to 'Fire in the Valley' and 'What the Dormouse Said' as excellent historical treatises on the developments during the pioneering phases of today's technological revolution. The last two chapters - 'Email' and 'A Rocket on Our Hands' - as well as the final Epilogue make the effort of reading the entire storyline worthwhile. Stripped of a lot of the technical concepts, Hafner and Lyon bring the compelling story of the pioneers of this wonderful collaborative communications tool that has come to be so fully integrated into our daily lives today. Furthermore, the book chronicles how the Internet of today evolved from a collaborative research tool (ARPANET) under the control of a small office in the Pentagon (ARPA, and then DARPA) into the commercial entity it has become today. 'Where Wizards Stay Up Late' provides a wide-arching overview of where the technologies of packet-switching and TCP/IP came from, as well as that of the collaborative mainstay of business today - Electronic Mail. Even with the often misrepresented quote from then-Presidential candidate Al Gore, the underlying technologies that comprise the internet remain a solid mystery to the typical internet denizen. In fact, it would probably be safe to assume that most users believe that the origins of the internet came about in the late 1990s.

The story of the various interlocking aspects of the internet isn't readily understood by the average user of its technologies. Luckily this book has an index and now we have the internet as well to help us out.Īll that said, if you are interested in the history of the Internet this book is a great place to start. Sure, the book may seem like a never ending list of names, but ARPAnet was an endeavor that lasted for 21 years and had hundreds of contributors, so there is no other way. Now, I see many people struggling with keeping track of people.

When it came to explaining the technology and engineering I believe that the author managed to hit the right balance of writing it in general terms without watering it too much down. It is both reassuring and disturbing that flaming has been with us since the 70s. Of course there were little detours into the culture of openness and early flame wars as well. This book is about the creation of the Internet, or better yet the ARPAnet (1969 - 1990) that spawned it.Įverything is here: the people and reasons for its creation, beginnings of underlying technologies like packet switching, distributed networks an so on, early fights over standards and finally its proliferation and metamorphosis from ARPAnet to the Internet.

Where wizards stay up late by katie hafner