The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist [Paperback]

Vallee (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 210 pages
• Publisher: Ronin Publishing; First Printing edition (July 23, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 091590473X
• ISBN-13: 978-0915904730
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 5.1 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,009,036 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Jacques VALLEE holds a master's degree in astrophysics from France and a PhD in computer science from Northwestern University, where he served as an associate of Dr. J. Allen Hynek. He is the author of several books about high technology and unidentified phenomena, a subject that first attracted his attention as an astronomer in Paris. While analyzing observations from many parts of the world, Jacques became intrigued by the similarities in patterns between moderrn sightings and historical reports of encounters with flying objects and their occupants in every culture. The result was the seminal book Passport to Magonia, published in 1969.

After a career as an information scientist with Stanford Research Institute and the Institute for the Future, where he served as a principal investigator for the groupware project on the Arpanet, the prototype of the Internet, Jacques Vallée co-founded a venture capital firm in Silicon Valley. He lives in San Francisco.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Computer history: A contemporary view on the future, July 22, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Network Revolution: Confessions of a Computer Scientist (Paperback)

In the early 1990's, when the Internet was about to be discovered by mainstream media, I found this book (then already ten years old) in a friend's bookshelf. I started reading a chapter about some `Midnight Irregulars' and immediately recognized what the author was describing - it was the friendly computer network environment of the early 80's, when the event of the user `guest' logging in from a remote site didn't automatically trigger every alarm bell at the computer center, but was rather seen as a manifestation of innocent curiosity.

That was enough for me to want to read the whole book. The author, a Frenchman working as something of a computer consultant in the USA, relates his experiences from twenty years of interaction with computer users, at a time when they were probably a lot fewer than a million worldwide. His choice of subject may seem narrow to the general reader, but the book gave me a nostalgic kick, reminding me of my own feelings with regard to thi! s environment back around 1980.

Although covering approximately the same timespan as Steven Levy in `Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution', Vallee mentions the hackers only in passing. Still, he manages to describe many features of the hacker culture, but from the perspective of a scientist and casual witness.

"Computer scientists have documented everything except their own work" Vallee claims, and then tries to fill a few gaps. While nowhere near a complete work on the history of computing, this book provides a number of revealing snapshots from places and events remembered by few today, told in an entertaining manner. The reader gets to learn about a French 1970's neo-luddite movement for the destruction of computers, about the endless discussions between French and American delegations on the standardization of computer terminology, and about a nun with a pretty sophisticated idea on the ergonomic design of desktop video terminals.

With this history! as background, the author goes on to make a number of pred! ictions about the future, some of which seem remarkably accurate today. Our hardware may be thousands of times faster, but have we really made any significant progress since this book was written? Those who fail to learn the lessons of computer history are doomed to be stuck in an infinite loop.

If you worked with mainframe computers in the academic environment before 1984, this book is for you. Others may enjoy it too.