Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet

"Where the wizards stay up late" is an excellent, funny and easy to read description about the history of the internet. It is well researched and engaging. The book consists of eight chapters about the creation of the ArpaNet, the predecessor of the Internet. It starts with describing the creation of the ARPA research organization in the US government, the people influencal to that creation and the description of Licklider, the early head of the agency which was so influencal to the creation on the net. The second chapter discusses the creation of the concept of packet-switching by Paul Baran and Donald Davies and how this was, early on, ignored by most of the rest of the world. Especially the attitude of AT&T is, in retrospective, of course quite amusing. The third chapter talks about the history of BBN, which was the company that build the first 'routers' (called IMPs) for the first network. And how this small company won the contract for building the ARPANET. The book continues with the creation of the first IMP for the UCLA and how the company had trouble with the early Honeywell computers that were used as a basis. The early computers had a bug in their synchronization which caused the machine to be much less reliable than needed. Honeywell couldn't believe how reliable BBN wanted the machine to be. Quite amusing. The following chapter covers the history of Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Vint created (with Kahn) later the TCP and IP protocols, Steve was the author of the first RFC--the way internet standards are described and how they have been evolved. The sixth chapter describes the creation of more IMPs and how the ARPANET gradually grew... and the problems that caused. How the FTP protocol was created (and the mail protocol hacked in the FTP protocol) and how they showed off the ARPANET during a small conference (and AT&T still not believing in the concept). The next chapter covers Email. The creation of Email and how it became the major usage of the network early on. Especially interesting are the discussions about mail headers and inconsistency. At least it demonstrations that easy agreement in creating the internet protocols is an illusion, it took a lot of discussion and a long time. The final chapter goes in a faster pace and explains how Cerf/Kahn created the IP protocol and implemented that on other networks and how the NFS created a new network gradually linking more and more networks together and creating the Internet. Amusing to read was how the ARPANET actually became more and more a government DOD network and that it, in a sense, was NOT the 'father' network of the internet (depending on how you define father... it wasn't the first network to be linked up). Also the story of the creating of Ethernet and the fight between OSI and TCP/IP are amusing. The book ends with a small epilogue describing the 25th anniversary of BBN for the creating of the first IMP. I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is exceptionally well written and researched. The history its sharing is amusing and especially considering the impact of the decisions made back then in the world today. This book is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in computer science, networking and its history. A must read.

After watching Halt and Catch Fire, I became interested in the early internet and this book popped up in a recommended list. The reviews aren't incorrect. This book is terrific. This was written in the late '90's so the purview of the book is a bit dated considering how the internet exploded by 2000, but this is a fascinating story. The book is somewhat technical so if you have a slight understanding of how the internet works, information is transmitted and the like, this is an easy read and excellent. Well worth the read to see how the foundations of the internet lied in computing explosions of technology in the '50's and '60's. Yes millennials they actually had computers dating back decades..... I digress. Also, thought ARPA was involved and there was discussion of communication due to a nuclear attack, this is actually a myth. The main reason was to be able to network computing power across the county and to be able to exchange information with different computers and systems. Somehow I whipped through this book in a few sittings. Wonderful. Recommended. (Why not 5 stars then? Well, this is a very worthwhile book. I give 5 stars for things that blow my socks off. This is a great read, but my socks are still on if I give everything 5 stars I have no 11 to go to. What does 11 mean? LOL).

I am a Gen-X I.T. guy. I was raised from the time personal computers were thousands of dollars and were bought by offices to allow their employees to have primitive word processing programs and maybe a simple calculator. For all computers to be linked together and able to talk to each other, share information, locate problems between them, and enable human beings a new facility to communicate in addition to humankind's speech, hearing, touch, and thought that becomes a new basic ability for us just as these others are. (Who could go a day without texts or email messages coming to them to realize their new place in the world?). This book takes the birth of the Internet--what preceded it, what promoted it, what was required to be invented so it could fulfill its purpose--and tells it in interviews with the founding fathers (there were not founding women based on the culture of the time) and goes back through records and accomplishments that led piece by piece to the network of networks we have today. The book makes real people out of the original engineers and programmers and showed how they thought, what they did to overcome their problems, and how they worked together as teams to come up with one of the most important intelligence-expanding discoveries in the history of the human race. This book is written for both computer-neophytes (gives definitions of the terms and vocabulary used that even casual computer users will find relevant in today's computer-oriented world) and experienced computer- and network- experts. Without the products of these inventors and geniuses, the connected world we have today where practically everyone in non-third-world countries has access to a computer and the Internet, the connectedness we enjoy as a world full of people would not be present to the extent it is today. For anyone wanting to understand how this most significant discovery was made and put together, this is the book that is easy to read and understand and will help you see the providence that combined to make this invention that will save the planet and lead mankind to the stars possible.

Compelling read with interesting personalities and seemingly impossible challenges. Technical terms succinctly explained in parentheses. People who grew up in the era before the internet will be fascinated with what was accomplished. People who grew up with ubiquitous access to computer technology will get a good idea of what it takes to make it all work.

Excellent and entertaining social history of BBN, ARPANET, and the Internet. I think it reached a good balance between the people, events, and technology. It was entertaining without being “popular”, and historical without being “academic”. For me, the book did a good job of taking me back in time and seeing things from that perspective of those times, rather than from the author’s point of view, or ours today. The “narrarator”, if there was one, disappeared completely but told an interesting story. It is a shame that BBN and the engineers are not better known, considering the importance of their contributions. It is about the very beginning of the Internet, not so much how it came together after ARPANET. It gave me a new perspective on the Boston area where I lived for several years. I looked the BBN campus up on the net, and you can still see where it all started.

This is the most thoroughly researched book on this topic I have seen, so I would rate it to be a foundational text on its topic. It is also written in a prose that reads exceptionally well. There are two topic areas where it fall short. Some early materials that would have been classified as "Secret - Need to Know" at a minimum, and which were probably Top Secret were not available to the authors. These deal with the roots of some of the key technologies in the Minuteman HICS network. The second area deals with the history of networking for personal computers which started with various BBS systems including CompuServe and FidoNet, then added PC-LAN technology in the 1980's which included several automated address management systems including those by Novell and Apple. Finally, the critical role of the development of DHCP which enabled LAN systems to switch to the TCP/IP protocol in the early 1990's, thus enabling the rise of the World Wide Web, which simply could not have become what it has without that transition. I would love to see Katie (Matt tragically died at much too young of an age) do a second edition with some more material added in the areas that I mentioned above. If she were to take on a new collaborator, Brian McCullough of the Internet History Podcast would make an excellent choice.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late is a good look at the politics, and background that have become the Internet we use today. Contrary to popular belief, Al Gore did not start the Internet. In fact, the book uses the word 'internetting' to refer to an international work group designed to help computers all over the world connect to each other in the mid-late 1970s. The book goes in depth and covers all of the interesting bits that concern the creation of the ARPANET.

This book was an excellent history of the people, ideas, and technologies that gave rise to the modern Internet. It was also riveting. I had never really heard of anyone of the people in this book, with the exception of Tim Berners-Lee, who is only mentioned briefly near the end of the book. Berbers-Lee is credited with creating/inventing the World Wide Web in 1990. This book is about everything that happened before that. Starting in the 1950s and 60s, the book covers the birth of the idea of networking computers, the development of the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet), which takes up most of the book; the development of standards and applications such as the TCP/IP protocols, TELNET, and email. It also touches on such things as the ALOHANet, the NSFNet, the invention of Ethernet, the idea and development of packet-switching as a way of moving information through a network vs one message at a time through phone lines, etc. It starts off by challenging the belief that the Internet was primarily, or even secondarily, developed as a way for the U.S. military to communicate in the event of a nuclear attack on the U.S., and only gets better from there. P.S., I read this book because it was listed as, "suggested reading" for a Coursera course I am taking this semester called, "The history of the Internet, technology, and security."

a must for those interested in computers/internet history

L'informatique est certes jeune mais il y a déjà de quoi écrire son histoire. La création d'Internet en est un épisode majeur et ce livre la raconte brillamment. À recommander (ou à offrir) à tous les passionnés d'informatique.

I loved this book - even if it is not perfect and is definitely a bit nerdy. Although it would need to be updated in a second edition, I found the history of the net fascinating. Now I really want to understand the technical details of networking, which I should have done years ago.

課題で出るくらいなのでいい本なんだと思います。まぁ、本当は、Webの創成の方が良かったみたいですが、絶版で中古も元値より高い値段が付いてることが多いのでこっちにしました。