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thejoyofbooking's review
3.0
I picked this book up because I love reading about how things I take for granted come to be. Books like Tears of Mermaids or The Facebook Effect, or anything that tells the story behind the story. Where Wizards Stay Up Late did not disappoint. The book follows the lives and discoveries of the small group of men (sadly, no women were involved!) who created what we know now as the internet.
Of course, they didn’t realize that’s exactly what they were doing. In the 50s and 60s, government-funded computer research was focused on things like feeding facts to a computer (it’s raining in Moscow but Wednesday will be sunny) and hoping it would accurately predict whether the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. A few people were able to see that computers were not a form of intelligence themselves, but enabled thinking humans to take advantage of the country’s wealth of research by connecting universities to one another over a network of computers talking to each other.
And ARPANET was born. The section of the book that describes the beginnings of ARPANET, the first computers to be connected, and how the entire process worked was like reading a fast-paced thriller. Things kept going wrong at the last moment, but they came together well enough in the end to prove the worth of the experiment. And in very short order, people were using the early network for what we use it for now – discussion, discourse, and flame-outs. (No kidding!)
The writing isn’t very technical – I still can’t tell you how a computer works, and I wouldn’t be able to recreate the internet if society collapsed. But I know a lot more history than I did before I read the book, and I appreciate the internet all the more for it. The edition of the book that I read was published in 1996, so the internet has completely revolutionized itself and the rest of the world at least once since publication. I think, however, that the rest of the story is far less interesting than the beginning.
Of course, they didn’t realize that’s exactly what they were doing. In the 50s and 60s, government-funded computer research was focused on things like feeding facts to a computer (it’s raining in Moscow but Wednesday will be sunny) and hoping it would accurately predict whether the Soviet Union had nuclear weapons. A few people were able to see that computers were not a form of intelligence themselves, but enabled thinking humans to take advantage of the country’s wealth of research by connecting universities to one another over a network of computers talking to each other.
And ARPANET was born. The section of the book that describes the beginnings of ARPANET, the first computers to be connected, and how the entire process worked was like reading a fast-paced thriller. Things kept going wrong at the last moment, but they came together well enough in the end to prove the worth of the experiment. And in very short order, people were using the early network for what we use it for now – discussion, discourse, and flame-outs. (No kidding!)
The writing isn’t very technical – I still can’t tell you how a computer works, and I wouldn’t be able to recreate the internet if society collapsed. But I know a lot more history than I did before I read the book, and I appreciate the internet all the more for it. The edition of the book that I read was published in 1996, so the internet has completely revolutionized itself and the rest of the world at least once since publication. I think, however, that the rest of the story is far less interesting than the beginning.
statman's review
3.0
This is an older book published back in 1996 that explains how the internet came to be. The authors were able to interview all the principal characters in that process and no, Al Gore is not mentioned in this book. I found it to be fascinating on how these individuals worked together to make it happen. It was not a be grand Eureka moment, but rather it was a series of small steps, overcoming one technical challenge at a time that ultimately resulted in the technology behind the internet. You can get a feel for how the technology works but there's parts of it where the story gets lost in some of the technical explanations.
rmichno's review
4.0
Very interesting look at how Arpanet was created and how it lead to the Internet as we know it. Kinda geeky at times and also full of lots of people who I couldn't always keep straight, but the story was told in a clear way at a good pace.
dodothedev's review
hopeful
informative
inspiring
medium-paced
4.75
Fantastic book and very well written to help understand the birth and early days of the internet.
gregbrown's review
A nice-enough book about the birth, life, and successors of ARPANET—really, the origins of computer networking in general.
The authors do a good job of illustrating the varying institutions, personalities, and challenges (both bureaucratic and technological) standing in the way of networking computers together for the first time. It's very much in the pop-history vein, but predates the more recent trend of taking cutesy angles so nothing gets annoying. I get why some readers are upset it didn't dive into the technical issues a little deeper, but this isn't that kind of book!
Biggest downside: the book was written in 1996, and doesn't include much material past the 1970s. Usenet goes unmentioned, and the World Wide Web gets a glancing reference in the epilogue. So much of what we think of as "the internet" didn't come about until the '90s, so writing midstream is going to give you some problems on knowing what to include (Mosaic) and what wouldn't last (gopher).
The authors do a good job of illustrating the varying institutions, personalities, and challenges (both bureaucratic and technological) standing in the way of networking computers together for the first time. It's very much in the pop-history vein, but predates the more recent trend of taking cutesy angles so nothing gets annoying. I get why some readers are upset it didn't dive into the technical issues a little deeper, but this isn't that kind of book!
Biggest downside: the book was written in 1996, and doesn't include much material past the 1970s. Usenet goes unmentioned, and the World Wide Web gets a glancing reference in the epilogue. So much of what we think of as "the internet" didn't come about until the '90s, so writing midstream is going to give you some problems on knowing what to include (Mosaic) and what wouldn't last (gopher).