Customer Reviews

A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime

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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!

I recently bought the book after having read the raving reviews here on Amazon. Before I turn to my critique, it has to be said that Naughton makes a fine effort in bringing together the whole context (or at least some sort of plausible context) of "the internet". There are some not uninteresting bits of information on various side issues such as ham radio.

Anyway, as for the core topic -- the internet -- it turns out the book is little more than a mix of pieces taken very much in sequence from the awesome and much underrated Hafner and Lyon book, some actually very funny manual type of sections on things like how to use a browser to click on hyperlinks, and towards the end a little bit of Raymond and Lessig inspired musings about how much open source is better than proprietary software, and how the internet is threatened by corporate giants.

For a serious researcher this book is almost totally useless as an original source of information. Also, there are some strange asides such as on page 147 "'Real e-mail dates from 1970" with a footnote stating that "For some reason, Hafner and Lyon ... date it as 'one day in 1972', but this must be wrong because the RFC archive shows a flurry of discussions of a mail protocol in the summer and autumn of 1971." This explanation makes no sense to me, for there have been all sorts of dead end RFCs, especially in the very early days. I could elaborate the discussion on what qualifies as the "first email ever" much further, but the crucial point is that Naughton offers very little authoritative information and introduces quite a bit of subjectivity on the sources he builds on.

As an aside, don't even waste your time with the Abbate book, just get the Hafner and Lyon book and get to the original sources of the BBN guys, the NWG, Pouzin, Cerf, and the more recent Dave Clark papers on design principles and the internet.

This book is essentially an overview of the development and evolution of the Internet, ending with the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft. It was initially published in the UK in 1999, then in the US in 2000. There is some discussion of the intellectual backstories such as Norbert Wiener's cybernetics and JCR Licklider's ideas on interactive computing, but the book is mainly about the birth and growth of the Net. This book lacks detail - and is in that sense superficial - but it works well as the general overview the author meant it to be.

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.