Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet

A history of the Internet and the story of the scientists behind its creation describes the 1960s effort funded by the Defense Department and the technologies that contributed to its monumental growth

Hafner, coauthor of Cyberpunk, and Lyon, assistant to the president of the University of Texas, here unveil the Sputnik-era beginnings of the Internet, the groundbreaking scientific work that created it and the often eccentric, brilliant scientists and engineers responsible. Originally funded during the Eisenhower administration by IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office) within the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor, was devised as a way to share far-flung U.S. computer resources at a time when computers were wildly expensive, room-sized bohemoths unable to communicate with any other. The husband-and-wife writing team profile the computer engineering firm of Bolt Baranek and Newman, which produced the original prototypes for ARPANET, and they profile the men (there were virtually no women) and an alphabet soup of agencies, universities and software that made the Internet possible. And while the book attempts to debunk the conventional notion that ARPANET was devised primarily as a communications link that could survive nuclear war (essentially it was not), pioneer developers like Paul Baran (who, along, with British Scientist Donald Davies devised the Internet's innovative packet-switching message technology) recognized the importance of an indestructible message medium in an age edgy over the prospects of global nuclear destruction. The book is excellent at enshrining little known but crucial scientist/administrators like Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts and Joseph Licklider, many of whom laid the groundwork for the computer science industry.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Now that high school students are spending their spare time cruising the Internet, it's probably time the rest of us found out how the whole thing started. Newsweek contributing editor Hafner (coauthor of Cyberpunk, 1991) and husband Lyon, who is assistant to the president of the University of Texas, begin their story back in the '50s, when President Eisenhower decided that basic scientific research was the quickest way to improve the nation's defense. The key instrument was the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), nominally part of the Pentagon. ARPA quickly acquired several advanced computers; when several scientists (notably J.C.R. Licklider and Robert G. Taylor) began to wonder why none of the computers could ``talk'' to the others, the seeds of the Internet were sown. Believing that advanced computing capacity was vital to the national defense, ARPA proposed connecting a number of computers through the phone system. A small Massachusetts company, Bolt Beranek and Newman, managed to win the bid; within a year, inventing almost everything from the ground up, they had managed to connect several college campuses on the West coast. Gradually, the ARPANET became the focus of an intensive development effort among computer scientists; but their goals were far different from the defense projects its creators had envisioned. Far-reaching decisions were made by the first person who happened to tackle the problem at hand. E-mail quickly took center stage, followed by newsgroups in which scientists with a common interest could exchange information and views. By the time the Defense Department decided to try to regain control, it was obvious that they had inadvertently created an entity no single authority could control. Within 25 years, the Internet had grown from an impossible dream to an indispensable scientific tool. A clear and comprehensive, though often flat, account of an important bit of scientific history. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Hafner (coauthor of Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier, LJ 6/1/91) and Lyon tell the fascinating story of some extraordinary computer scientists who, with the Department of Defense in the late 1960s, developed the Arpanet. It is based mostly on interviews with those scientists and engineers who designed and built a revolutionary computer network that spawned the global Internet. The authors dispel a widely held belief, propagated for years by the mainstream press, that the Arpanet and the Internet were developed to either support or to survive nuclear war. Rather, the project aimed to link computer resources at laboratories across the country and enable scientists to share research and computing resources over a network. An important historical work for most library collections.
-?Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.