A Brief History Of The Future: Origins and Destiny of the Internet (Hardcover)

The Internet, argues Naughton, is one of the 20th century's greatest inventions ("a force of unimaginable power"), but the individuals who built it have been overlooked. Truly great programmers "are like great poets or great mathematicians" and should be treated accordingly. In a volume sprinkled with literary references, Naughton redresses that oversight, starting at MIT in the 1930s, where the seeds of the Net were planted by three fascinating personalities, Vannavar Bush, Norbert Weiner and J.C.R. Licklider.

Later chapters explore the work-sharing ethos and Open Source movement that grew up among the programmers who worked on the Internet, and the World Wide Web, the system invented by Tim Berners-Lee that has been largely responsible for the popularisation of the Internet. Always the professor, Naughton has included a glossary of terms and an associated Web site with up-to-date reference material. He never shies away from explaining important technical innovations like packet switching and TCP/IP, but does so using metaphors that are accessible to non-scientists.

But the heart of the book is Naughton's account of his own fascination with the Internet. Growing up in remote rural Ireland he loved the radio, which made "links to other places, other cultures, other worlds". The Web allows communication on an even larger scale, and he heralds the democratic promise of this fundamentally open, communal and evolving system. Clearly Naughton is enraptured with the Net, and that passion comes across on every page of this intelligent, compelling book. --Tamsin Todd --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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The Internet is the most remarkable thing human beings have built since the Pyramids. A millennium from now, historians will look back at it and marvel that a people equipped with such clumsy tools succeeded in creating such a Leviathan. John Naughton's book intersperses wonderful personal stories with an authoritative and beautifully written account of where the net actually came from, who invented it and why, and where it might be taking us. Most of us have no idea of how the Internet works or who created it. Even fewer have any idea of what it means for society and the future. A Brief History of the Future is an impassioned attempt to rescue the Internet from the condescension of posterity, to celebrate the engineers and scientists who created it and to explain the values and ideas that drove them. Its heroes are the people who laid the foundations of the post-modern world -- from visionaries like Robert Taylor, Norbert Wiener and Ted Nelson to the engineers -- Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Larry Roberts, Bob Kahn and Tim Berners-Lee -- who implemented their dreams in hardware and software. In a cynical age, John Naughton has not lost his capacity for wonder. In this book, he writes about the Net in the way that Nick Hornby writes about football. He examines the nature of his own enthusiasm for technology and traces its roots in his lonely childhood and in his relationship with his father. A Brief History of the Future is an intensely personal celebration of vision and altruism, ingenuity and determination and above all, of the power of ideas, passionately felt, to change the world.

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