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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
What a stroll down memory lane!, October 13, 2008
This review is from: On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders (Hardcover)
As someone who went through quite a few phone cords on my trusty Vic Modem and remembers my first acoustic coupler modem for my Texas Instruments computer, I was very interested in this book and boy, it did not disappoint! I have been online in some form or fashion since 1979/1980, operated my own BBS in the dial-up days, and helped establish the first download software store on Prodigy, so this book was a great stroll down memory lane. Even if you can't recall what it was like to not always have a computer in your home and always be online, this is a great book to learn about where things started and how we got to the now ubiquitous world wide web.
The book starts out with a great foreword by celeb-nerd (I say that with the greatest fondness!) Orson Scott Card, which made me laugh out loud at some of the antics we all did back then. Who didn't go into stores after learning some BASIC to do a silly print statement with a goto to watch your handiwork repeat over and over? It jumps quickly and pretty much in chronological order to ARPANET, TeleNet, CompuServe, and GEIS, among others with some pretty interesting trivia tidbits (do you know what the first internet message was or why the @ sign is used in email addresses?). It then progresses into what most folks in their 30s who were on the scene will remember such as Delphi, Q-Link, The WELL, and into America Online, Prodigy, and onto the onramp to the information superhighway as we now know it.
One of the things I liked best about the book was its coverage of some of the "colorful" personalities that built and/or worked on the various online systems of the day--there are many others besides Steve Case. Often when one reads histories related to subjects like this, they are dry and much of the personality of various players are lost--this is not the case with this book. I also enjoyed coverage of some of the great ideas that eventually failed and reasons why (anyone remember Plink or eWorld?).
For anyone that was a participant of the scene during these times, or simply wants to know how the web as we know it got to this point, I heartily recommend this book. I have read several books on this subject and they either miss too much or start with America Online/Prodigy as if that was the genesis of the web. As with any book of reasonable length on this topic, some things are not covered which I would have liked to see more of such as the early days of the Microsoft Network (MSN), WIX (Windows Information eXchange), and early IRC implementations, but this is no way detracts from the book and is more of a personal interest since I was a user of them back in the day. Overall, I would give this book a 10/10 without hesitation, especially considering the depth/breadth of the author's knowledge of the subject matter and easy-reading manner in which the author communicates it.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Great Insight Into The History Of The Internet!, November 18, 2008
This review is from: On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders (Hardcover)
Michael A. Banks did a great job keeping me interested in reading about the beginning of the internet. The beginnings of the internet were in the government and the universities. When he talks about two universities communicating for the first time cross-country, I could not help but feel it was as monumental as the east railroad line meeting the west railroad line!
It was very interesting to see how some very good ideas failed miserably, while others flourished. The beginnings of community sites like Compuserve were truly the predecessor of many of our social networking sites today.
The in depth coverage of Billy von Meister kept me in suspense with each business venture he conjured up. Billy was truly a pioneering internet entrepreneurial spirit. He was quite an adventurer, and his flamboyant lifestyle went along with his spend, spend, spend business tactics. He was a visionary who knew how to acquire venture capital and how to build a business from ground up. I enjoyed reading about it.
Who doesn't remember getting those AOL floppy disks in their mail?? Although I was never a member, it wasn't hard to see the impact of AOL on my friends and the world at large who were members. While I was busy plunking out COBOL II code on a mainframe at work, my friends were enjoying the ease of use and communities of AOL.
The interactivity available via the internet seemed to take many by surprise in the early days, but not anymore. Today, the best sites provide plenty of engaging interactivity (like this one, letting me give a review that all the world can see!). This book was really engaging to read, I recommend it.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Joy to Read and Hard to Put Down, October 11, 2008
This review is from: On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders (Hardcover)
Having graduated from high school in the late 80's, I was not "around" the online scene. At that age we had better things to do, or so we thought at the time, so my awareness did not develop until the early to middle part of the following decade. What a joy it was to read Michael A. Banks' On The Way To The Web to fill in the gaps.
We met some interesting characters on the way. The most memorable character whom I had never heard of before was William F. von Meister, or "von Scheister", the serial entrepreneur and son of European royalty who started CompuCon in the late 70's, which became The Source in 1979. From there, we also learned about the origins of CompuServe, and we experienced how the entire online industry developed, given the technical and competitive constraints. We learned what made CompuServe popular, and what differentiated AOL (as if this weren't obvious).
In Chapter 2 "In the Money" Banks introduces us to timeshare computing, but most importantly he introduces us people like Larry Roberts, Vint Cerf, and Bob Kahn, who were major players in the early days of the ARPA/DARPA project that became the Internet. In the opening chapters of the book, my main criticism is the shallow portrayal of these people. Where did they work? What did their offices look like? Or smell like? What restaurants did they frequent? Such details, while seemingly mundane, turn these legends into real people with real thoughts and real limitations. Banks deflects this criticism in the Afterword by emphasizing the intent to focus on the services that preceded popular adoption of the Internet, but this gap still feels real to the reader.
Similarly, having built up a wonderful cast of characters and companies, Banks kills them off rapidly and ungraciously in the final Chapter 15 "Moving to the Net". The same deflection applies--by 1994 the web was well established and hence outside the scope of the book--but Banks would have done well to spend some more time on how these pre-web pioneers dealt with the Internet, how they adjusted their competitive strategies, and how and why those strategies succeeded or failed.
While the first two chapters and final chapter were weak, the center of the book provides a fascinating journey through a period of time that has not been well discussed elsewhere. The book fills in gaps, but it also puts our current Internet into context.
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