Inventing the Internet (Inside Technology) (Paperback)

~ (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

History is written by winners, but Bill Gates isn't talking yet. Those interested in how this weird, wonderful World Wide Web--and its infrastructure--came to be should turn to historian Janet Abbate's look at 40 years of innovation in Inventing the Internet.

Peeking behind the curtain to show the personalities and larger forces guiding the development of the Net, from its dawn as a robust military communications network designed to survive multiple attacks to today's commercial Web explosion, Abbate succeeds in demystifying this all-pervasive technology and its creators.

Abbate's survey covers everything from David Baran's work with the RAND corporation to the development of packet-switching theory to CERN's Tim Berners-Lee and his hypertext networking system. She also factors in the influences that caused the Net to evolve such as the Cold War, changing research priorities, and the hacker subculture that pushed existing technologies into new forms, each more and more like today's fast, global communications system.

The research is impeccable, the writing is lively, and the analysis is insightful. (See especially the discussion of the "surprise hit" of ARPANET, a minor function known as e-mail.) Abbate clearly knows her subject and her audience, and Inventing the Internet encapsulates a milestone of modern history. --Rob Lightner --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Publishers Weekly

The prehistory of the InternetAmeaning the period including Gopher and WAIS but before the World Wide WebAis often recounted among wonks but unknown to most others. Abbate, a history lecturer at the University of Maryland, traces the conversion of the ARPANET, a project of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency created to allow scientists to run computers remotely, to the World Wide Web, an application created by a Swiss CERN physicist in the early 1990s for transmitting sound and pictures along with text, with a number of stages along the way. From the opening discussion of "packet switching," a major innovation in information exchange, Abbate makes it clear that "technical standards can be used as social and political instruments," and that hardware and software architecture is as much a product of social formations as the other way around. ARPANET was created at the height of the Cold War so that military communications could be maintained in the event of nuclear exchange, but the scientists who created it, in true Kuhnian fashion, used a loose set of ideas about end user-driven computing to overturn conventional wisdom. The book, firmly academic, has the feel of an extremely well-written doctoral dissertation and is thus unable to avoid being freighted with the acronyms and the inherent complexity of its subject. While most readers won't care about CCITT standards or how TCP/IP works, they will find themselves at least curious about the people who created them. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: The MIT Press (July 31, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0262511150
• ISBN-13: 978-0262511155
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (11 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #452,014 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Great Stocking Stuffer for the Techies on Your List, December 15, 1999

By	Gayle Simpson, PhD (Cambridge, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Inventing the Internet (Inside Technology) (Hardcover)

For how long have you been aware of the web? Five years? Six? Didn't it seem as though we woke up one morning and there it was? Not so, as you will find out when you read this fascinating account of the way in which Internet technology took on a life of its own and morphed into the gigantic marketplace/library/chatroom that we think of today.

For example, did you know that the techniques used in the Internet were born out of Cold War paranoia? Or that email was an afterthought to the original system that unexpectedly became the most popular application of the network? Or that in the early 1980s, the military agency running the Internet was so afraid of hackers breaking into the system ("unauthorized penetrations," as one army major put it) that they split the network in two, one for the military and one for the civilians? Read the book for the details on these and other intriguing techno-tidbits.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Will high-tech history repeat itself?, February 8, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Inventing the Internet (Inside Technology) (Hardcover)

If we don't know where we've been, how will we know where we're going? It's somehow reassuring to learn that a technology which seems to be so new and to change at lightning speed actually has a history spanning several decades. This book is intelligently written; it's not for the reader who is looking merely for fluff and sound bites. I've recommend it to many friends in a variety of fields since internet technology, and the decisions that have been made about it, affect us all in one way or another.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars What's it like to invent a whole new kind of thing?, July 4, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Inventing the Internet (Inside Technology) (Hardcover)

What makes some new technologies (like the net) widely adopted successes, and others (like the futuristic Paris subway system Bruno Latour describes in *Aramis*) flops? Abbate's answer is flexibility, and the ability to adapt to the unanticipated needs of new clients (which is actually pretty close to Latour's answer), and her fascinating history of the ARPAnet should be required reading for anyone involved in a project of similar ambition and scope.