Product Description

This work recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop. The main focus is on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internet's design and use. The story starts with the early networking breakthroughs formulated in Cold War think tanks and realized in the Defense Department's creation of the ARPANET. It ends with the emergence of the Internet and its rapid and seemingly chaotic growth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #435982 in Books
• Published on: 2000-09-14
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 272 pages

Amazon.co.uk 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 influences that caused the Net to evolve--the cold war, changing research priorities and the hacker subculture--that pushed existing technologies into new forms, each more closely resembling today's fast, global communications system.

The research is impeccable, the writing is lively and the analysis is insightful. (See especially the discussion about the "surprise hit" of ARPANET, a minor function called e-mail.) Abbate clearly knows her subject and her audience; Inventing the Internet encapsulates a milestone of modern history. --Rob Lightner