Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet by Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon

Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone. In the 1960's, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices. With Defense Department funds, he and a band of visionary computer whizzes began work on a nationwide, interlocking network of computers. Taking readers behind the scenes, Where Wizards Stay Up Late captures the hard work, genius, and happy accidents of their daring, stunningly successful venture. Editorial Reviews David Plotnikoff San Jose Mercury News The book, almost certainly destined to be the definitive work on the birth and early years of the Internet, is sweeping in scope....Whoever chooses to write the next chapter in the saga...has a tough act to follow. Daniel Akst Los Angeles Times Important...meticulous...admirably straightforward. Lars Eighner The Texas Observer In all the dreck and dross of Internet books, here is a brilliant gem...remarkably well written. Mark Baechtel The Washington Post Excellent...makes for crackling entertainment...reawakens a sense of wonder in readers jaded by too much Internet hype. Richard Bernstein The New York Times Book Review If you always wanted to know who put the 'at' sign in your E-mail address, then Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the book for you. - From the Publisher 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. (Aug.) - Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly 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. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 4/15/96.] Joe J. Accardi, Northeastern Illinois Univ. Lib., Chicago - Library Journal 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 inadvertentlycreated 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. - Kirkus Reviews