Customer Reviews

Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet

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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.

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.

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!

I've worked in the software industry for twenty years, and now I finally have an entertaining, enjoyable book to give to friends and family who don't really understand what I do all day. If you've ever struggled to explain how the internet works, or why anybody would use it. This is the book. I gave a copy to my 77 year old flight instructor, he loved it.

I loved this book because, while semi-technical, it is mostly about events and people that brought us the internet revolution. It took many "small bricks" to build the internet we know today, and hundreds of unsung hero's are revealed. Although I was not intimately involved in this revolution, it has touched my life over and over again, and now, at 70 years, I feel I am a part of it! I especially love the beginning of the authors personal story, which perfectly parallels my life and makes a marvelous connection between short-wave listening, ham radio, and the advent of the internet! The author is very clear in stating where there are "differing stories" about some of the events, which speaks well of his research in preparation for writing the book. This is a book for those that lived through the "beginning" of the future, and for those young people are pushing the future forward in the new millennium!