Customer Reviews

On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders

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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.

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.

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.

The book deals with the years leading up to the internet revolution, and all the technologies that eventually came together to become what is now the World Wide Web.

My own personal experience with online services began in the mid 90's, so I missed out on quite a bit of the excitement. I used Prodigy, and had heard of America Online and CompuServe, but really didn't understand the events leading up to the information superhighway. My goal in reading this book was to understand some of the things I missed out on, and to get a better picture of how the web really got started.

The book is arranged reasonably chronologically - chapter one takes place mostly in the 1960's; until reading this, I never even considered the possibility that computers could do anything that long ago, let alone do any networking. As the chapters go by, we see the growth of networks, online services, bulletin boards, and email. We see CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, and The Source, as well as several other unsuccessful products and companies. They even throw a few screen shots from some of these services back in the 80's - ridiculously lame by today's standards, but they were all the rage back then.

The book ends in the mid-1990's, when the one single web really replaced all of the individual online services. In addition, there's a summarized timeline from 1945-1994, showing each of the major advances leading up to the web.

I really enjoyed this book. It provided a lot of information that I never knew about how online services evolved throughout the past several decades, and gave me a better understanding of why some things are the way they are. The tone of the book is mostly dry facts and stories, but with a little humor and light-hearted fun thrown in on occasion to keep it entertaining as well as informative. And I don't believe Al Gore's name was mentioned once. Maybe he didn't invent the internet after all...

Highly recommended if you are interested in the topic...or if you were around for this stuff, and are just looking for some nostalgia.

On The Way To The Web is one book which I highly recommend to anyone who wants a definitive history on the internet. The amount of research and time which was obviously spent on compiling and organizing the short but colourful history of this wonder known as the Web is very worthy of recognition.

For those of us who remember the coming of the internet, On The Way To The Web is a journey back in time, revisiting many events, products and ideas which seemed so futuristic and impossible twenty years ago which have now become common place or fallen by the wayside. I personally had forgotten all about ventures such as GameLine - the innovative download service for Atari 2600 games and game updates. While I'm sure that many of today's gamers think that XBLA, Wii Shop and PlayStation Network were all 21st century inventions, GameLine was here first. Reading about GameLine again, I have to wonder where our games industry would be today if Atari hadn't experienced the downslide it did right at the time of GameLine's launch.

Like spelunkers finding their way through a deep dark cave, technology innovators such as Bill Louden, William Von Meister and others lead the way forward from the days of ARPANET, primitive BBS systems and proprietary communication software to the birth of ISPs, TCP/IP, global email, portals and that entity we all love to hate, AOL.

On The Way To The Web presents a comprehensive time line of where we started and the complicated path we took to get to where we are today in our global internet community. This book is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand how we became such an inter-connected society, the wonders and miracles of communication technology.

This was an interesting book for someone like me that has been using the internet since it first became available for "the rest of us" in the early 90's.

It's the story of some of the small and large players (people and companies) that were providing online services from the "early days".

In pre-history there were online BBS's that were mostly local in nature that you connected to with your computer and 300 baud modem --( you could read faster than the text moved) .... then came services like GEnie, The Source, CompuServe, DELPHI and what turned into the big one AOL... (I _really_ never paid for service on AOL...)

The history of AOL and the people around it is pretty interesting it took a few tries to get it right...

Those were not the "good old days" but it was a fun heady time. Service was very limited and slow -- but it was all new and exciting. Hands down the internet we have today is sooooo much better.

Anyway it's a good historical read

I'm old enough to have to admit to having owned a 300 bps modem connected to a Commodore 128, and being in awe of the ability to exchange emails in three or four days with people on the other side of the planet. Michael A. Banks takes you back to those times in the book On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders. It's far too easy to forget exactly what led us up to the place we are today when it comes to instantaneous communication via the web. This was a book I thoroughly enjoyed, and it brought back fond memories of my initial fascination with online activities.

Contents:
Looking Back - Where Did It All Begin?; In The Money; Making Contact With CompuServe; The Source; Dis-Content and Conflict; Evolution; Online Experiments; Trials and Errors; The Second Wave; AOL Gestation; The Third Wave; In With The New, Out With The Old; AOL Evolves - Expansion, Integration, and Success; Prodigy - The Flat-Rate Pioneer Who Just Didn't Get It; Moving To The Net; Omissions, Additions, and Corrections; Online Timeline; Bibliography; Founders; Index

Banks starts out in the 1960's with the beginnings of what we now know as the Internet. ARPANET was the first attempt to network two computers together through a common set of protocols that would allow dissimilar computers to communicate with each other. But even though ARPANET worked, it was still limited to government and educational institutions. The ability for the common man to hook into that power was nonexistent. Of course, the personal computer was not even a concept that most people could grasp. Computers were big and powerful (for the time), and who would need one all for themselves? This started to open up more in the 70's, when online database resources started to become available. Timesharing computers were available to connect to these sites via terminals, but the cost was incredibly steep, often in the hundreds of dollars per hour of connect time. To play in this world, you had to be rich.

But as time went on, the personal computer started to become a viable option for people, and with it an accessory that opened up the world... the modem. Companies started realizing that all the unused computing power on evenings and weekends could be made available to consumers with modems, and thus launched services like CompuServe, The Source, and Prodigy. Although purely text-based to start with, computer owners started to flock to these services offering revolutionary features like discussion forums, CB simulators (chat), and online news. Much like the dot.com era that's more understandable to people, the race was on to make your fortunes in the online world. Text-based offerings gave way to graphical interfaces, prices started to drop, ideas were born and died in a matter of just a couple of years, and greed and personalities were still in conflict with solid business plans.

Banks wraps up his book in the mid-90's, when Internet access was starting to become accessible to nearly anyone with a computer and modem. Bulletin board systems started dying out, as people didn't need to dial to get to individual sites any longer. A single phone connection to their ISP would connect them to the full world of the Internet. Walled-off content systems like CompuServe and Prodigy no longer had a monopoly on information, and had to adapt or fold. The "Web" had started to take off, and the proprietary offerings of content and navigations were in their final chapter.

For aging codgers like myself who were into computers during this time, On the Way to the Web is an incredibly interesting step back into the past. I fondly remember calling bulletin boards for hours on end at 300 bps, tying up our phone lines and incurring the wrath of those trying to call me. Getting a free trial period to a service like Online Airline Guides made me feel like I was on the bleeding edge of information and technology. At the time, it's hard to look at where you're at and envision a future vastly different than what you currently have. On the other hand, looking back now reminds you that history repeats itself, and the dot.com frenzy wasn't very much different than frenzies that came before. This book will be a great "blast from the past" for those like myself, as well as a great resource for those interested in how we got from two computers networked together to constant connectivity to everyone else.

You can even get your kids to read this and start with the "when I was your age, we didn't have..." stories. :)

Michael Banks does an excellent job consolidating the characters involved in the events leading up to the web. My first instinct was to think this book was going to be just another boring "history lesson" of the web. I couldn't be more wrong.

Michael is very in-depth with the stories associated to each character in his book. While all have their own story, the drama surrounding one character in particular, Bill von Meister, was especially thrilling.

While some aspects of the book will be more appreciated by geeks, it is good for all audiences -- geeks, students and your average PC user. I would highly recommend digging into "On the Way to the Web".

Book Review: On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders by Michael A. Banks

I remember my first CompuServe experience back in the early 80s. We were living in Ohio and my uncle worked in Columbus for some computer company. He had his own computer, which was absolutely amazing to me. I was in middle school at the time and remember being allowed to use the TRS-80 in the administrative offices. The computers were cool and I was hooked. I could chat with girls who didn't take one look at me and walk away.

"On the Way to the Web" brought back a lot of memories about the early days of the Internet and on-line services. I'm not sure people who weren't involved in on-line computing during the 80s and 90s would have that same nostalgic smile. If hearing the words eWorld or AppleLink doesn't ring any bells then you probably wouldn't enjoy this book. Banks assumes you know these services and their place in online history, and more importantly, how their development was parallel to the development of the greater Internet. Having lived through this dramatic time in history I still found myself confused on the relationship between these services and the Internet.

The first few chapters are amazing, and effectively captured the headiness of those early days during the 1970s when TCP/IP was not preordained to be the preferred way of computers talking to each other. After commercial online services entered the scene, Banks focuses primarily on those services and their lineage. While online services were clearly important to get us where we are today, he tells the history in a dry and matter-of-fact manner without explaining what else was going on at the time. The level of detail he went into about how these services was over the top. The book is hard to follow because the author tells too many stories at once. I constantly had to refer to the appendix to review the timeline. I expected more about the people involved, rather than the competing companies and their online strategies.

Overall the book was an enjoyable trip down memory lane, but fails to explain how we got from the origins of the Internet to where we are today.

Pros: Nice historical overview of the Internet
Cons: Hard to follow

This book is in the same vein as the Hackers book by Steven Levy (Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution). For a lot of people, this is a peek under the covers during what a few lived through. This peek gives the backgrounds and some of the ins and outs of what happened during the very heady days of "home-based" internet access.

Being an early user of the internet myself (I had a university account in the mid-80's), and a user of CompuServe, Prodigy, and various BBS's, this was quite the trip down memory lane and explains why they did not survive.