May 27, 2001
Book Review: Where Wizards Stay Up Late (Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon)
I got this book on the last trip up to Powell's. It tells the story of the various people that developed the Internet, from the ARPANET through about 1995. It was enjoyable for people who like reading the computer history books (which is me) but not particularly great. There was lots of information about the early days, Licklider and Taylor at ARPA, the "IMP guys" at BBN, and some of the colleges that were involved. But the growth during the 80's and 90's was not really handled at all, just breezed through. I was also bothered by the lack of actual footnotes, only some general endnotes and a very thorough bibliography. It seemed a bit unfocused, like they would use the great stories they got from interviews, but didn't try to dig into some of the items that didn't have those stories. Maybe they spared us from some boring details, but maybe important things were missed. Everyone was represented in a positive light, too, which may be true, but made the whole thing seem a bit artificial.
As to the stories told, it certainly seems like the typical strings of coincidences and too much hard work to get the very basic principles hammered out. I loved the comments about AT&T saying packet switching would never work - the same attitude I felt at my internship at Lucent. It was also surprising to me to see how hard it was to come up with the fundamental ideas of layered networks and gateways and TCP/IP, which I take for granted today. It seems like basic layers of abstraction, but I guess that is a concept from computer science that was developing at the same time. Does that not exist in other disciplines? Maybe some stretch from assembly lines and interchangable parts? It was nice to see that a lot of the people were dedicated to making a great network to foster collaboration among researchers and scientists, and not just interested in the business model.
Overall, I enjoyed it, but it wasn't a "classic" book of computing history.
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Posted by babar at May 27, 2001 02:02 PM