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Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet
 
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Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet [Hardcover]

John Naughton (Author)
5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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John Naughton, to judge by this learned but lightly written history of modern communications technology, is deeply interested in just about everything. It mystifies the Irish-born Cambridge University scholar that so few people share his fascination with the Internet--and, he grumps, "the higher you go up the social and political hierarchy the worse it gets."

A Brief History of the Future, whose title is just right, is Naughton's attempt to educate the uninitiated in how the Internet came to be. Although its development occurred in starts and stops over a half-century, the Internet came into its own only in the 1990s, with the arrival of the World Wide Web and widely available software to negotiate it. Each of those innovations, though, drew on work that sometimes extends deep into the past, and Naughton does a good job of tracing technical lineages. Though studded with geekspeak, his narrative doesn't presuppose much background knowledge on his readers' part, unlike Stephen Segaller's worthy Nerds 2.0.1., which covers some of the same ground. Naughton's cast of characters includes such scientific and administrative luminaries as Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, Paul Baran, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Tim Berners-Lee (but, sad to say, not Al Gore), each of whom made contributions large and small to what Naughton insists is a technological revolution with endless possibilities for the common good.

Well-written and richly detailed, Naughton's book is a fine introduction to the Net, and to the countless, largely unsung innovators who made it possible. --Gregory McNamee

From Publishers Weekly

One of the better meditations on technology and the Internet to burble up from the digerati in recent years, this fact-filled volume offers a selective history of computing as it traces the dawn of the World Wide Web and honors the engineers who created it. Naughton, a Cambridge fellow and a columnist for the Observer (U.K.), plunges into the nuances of packet-switching and compression algorithms as he indulges his obsession with communication, first evidenced by an intense interest in short-wave radio during his childhood in rural Ireland. Conveying detailed aspects of programming with relative ease, Naughton surveys the heroes of the Internet and reviews their achievements. We meet J.C.R. Licklider, the MIT-trained engineer who first pondered the tantalizing potential of "man-computer symbiosis," and the great Paul Baran, a talented young engineer at the RAND think tank who in 1959 developed the first distributed digital network for the U.S. military (which was stoutly resisted, Naughton points out, by top brass at the analogue-based AT&T). The heaviest hitter, however, is probably Tim Berners-Lee, who got interested in the idea of hyperlinks as a way of aiding his terrible memory and went on to develop the first Web browser and the now-ubiquitous HTML language for the Web. With amusing asidesAthe first e-mail message may have been sent by an engineer in L.A. asking his colleagues to retrieve a razor he left at a conference in the U.K.Athis is a particularly thoughtful and readable history of the Web to date. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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5.0 out of 5 stars I wish high school history had been like this, April 20 2002
This review is from: Brief History Of The Future (Paperback)
Next time you take a transcontinental flight to a technical conference, skip the airline movie and just read this wonderful book cover to cover. I wish history class in high school had been this much fun. Naughton has written the definitive history of the Internet so far. For example, when the Pentagon asked AT&T to build an early prototype of the Internet for them, AT&T pooh-poohed packet switching as a worthless idea concocted by some young whippersnapper (Paul Baran of the Rand Corp.) who knew nothing about proper telephone engineering. The book is full of anecdotes and funny stories. Great reading for old fogies and young fogies alike.
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5.0 out of 5 stars The entire history of the Internet's development, Feb 13 2001
This review is from: Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet (Hardcover)
What does the Internet mean for the future? An answer partially depends upon an analysis of the past, and John Naughton's Brief History of the Future is the first book to cover the entire history of the Internet's development, from those who first thought of it in the 1940s to the scientists and engineers who brought it to life. Anecdotes blend with history to provide an intriguing blend of personal and scientific observation.
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5.0 out of 5 stars Great book - reads like a novel!, Dec 6 2000
By 
Jack R. Colegrove (Strongsville, Ohio USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet (Hardcover)
Reads like a sci-fi novel while providing a solid understanding of how and why the Internet works. At times the detail is almost overdone but this only adds to the credibility of the author. I started with a Timex Sinclair computer and have lived through the period covered in this book without really understanding just what made the internet work. Now I know!
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