A Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet: Amazon.de: John Naughton: Englische Bücher

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EUR 23,99

Gebundene Ausgabe, Dezember 1999

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Gebundene Ausgabe: 320 Seiten
Verlag: Diane Pub Co (Dezember 1999)
Sprache: Englisch
ISBN-10: 0756762391
ISBN-13: 978-0756762391
Gr��e und/oder Gewicht: 21,3 x 14 x 4,1 cm

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Amazon.com

John Naughton, to judge by this learned but lightly written history of modern communications technology, is deeply interested in just about everything. It mystifies the Irish-born Cambridge University scholar that so few people share his fascination with the Internet--and, he grumps, "the higher you go up the social and political hierarchy the worse it gets."

A Brief History of the Future, whose title is just right, is Naughton's attempt to educate the uninitiated in how the Internet came to be. Although its development occurred in starts and stops over a half-century, the Internet came into its own only in the 1990s, with the arrival of the World Wide Web and widely available software to negotiate it. Each of those innovations, though, drew on work that sometimes extends deep into the past, and Naughton does a good job of tracing technical lineages. Though studded with geekspeak, his narrative doesn't presuppose much background knowledge on his readers' part, unlike Stephen Segaller's worthy Nerds 2.0.1., which covers some of the same ground. Naughton's cast of characters includes such scientific and administrative luminaries as Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, Paul Baran, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Tim Berners-Lee (but, sad to say, not Al Gore), each of whom made contributions large and small to what Naughton insists is a technological revolution with endless possibilities for the common good.

Well-written and richly detailed, Naughton's book is a fine introduction to the Net, and to the countless, largely unsung innovators who made it possible. --Gregory McNamee -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

From Booklist

A damnable thing about the Internet is its extraneous spam and double-click.com ads. An admirable thing about a well-written book is its distillation of the essence of its subject without any hypertext distractions. That's what Naughton does in this readable narrative of the beginnings of the Internet. For all the kudos heaped on Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, or on Vint Cerf, inventor of TCP/IP codes for electronic mail, Naughton underscores that the Internet's lineage reaches back to the 1930s and 1940s, when Vannevar Bush, then the czar of American science, cogitated about linking computers. Naughton smoothly segues the story to the 1960s, when computer networking became a vital concern to the Pentagon, whose Advanced Research Projects Agency financed the development of the first networks. The author clearly explains how various software engineers appraised problems in networking and designed solutions, such as breaking messages into packets for faster transmission; and he salts the technotalk with interesting anecdotes, as about the ubiquitous Rybczynski, Witold. One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. Sept_. 2000. 176p. illus. Scribner, $22 (0-684-86729-X).When prompted by a newspaper's request for an essay on the millennium's best tool, Rybczynski's thoughts alighted on the screwdriver. This charming book chronicles his first step in researching the essay, a hunt for the ur-reference or illustration of the prosaic device, which takes him back to incunabula. A justly lauded author of architectural topics (lately, as biographer of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, 1999), Rybczynski filigrees his bibliographic discoveries with humanizing sketches of the inventors who dealt with the difficult physical requirements of fashioning a screw, which, in the pre-precision-tool era, made it a more expensive attaching device than nails. Rybczynski conjectured that examples might be found in early modern weaponry, a hunch vindicated on his trip to an arms museum displaying arquebuses and jousting armor. And one knows that Archimedes' screw has to make an appearance; when it does, it caps a finely wrought excursion into a wonderful story that--who would have guessed it--reposed in the tool box. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved -- Dieser Text bezieht sich auf eine andere Ausgabe: Gebundene Ausgabe .

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The Stories and People of the internet You've Forgotten! 9. Oktober 2000

Von Ray Thompson - Ver�ffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

I loved this book because, while semi-technical, it is mostly about events and people that brought us the internet revolution. It took many "small bricks" to build the internet we know today, and hundreds of unsung hero's are revealed. Although I was not intimately involved in this revolution, it has touched my life over and over again, and now, at 70 years, I feel I am a part of it! I especially love the beginning of the authors personal story, which perfectly parallels my life and makes a marvelous connection between short-wave listening, ham radio, and the advent of the internet! The author is very clear in stating where there are "differing stories" about some of the events, which speaks well of his research in preparation for writing the book. This is a book for those that lived through the "beginning" of the future, and for those young people are pushing the future forward in the new millennium!

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I was actually disappointed ... 15. Juli 2009

Von mbaer - Ver�ffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

I recently bought the book after having read the raving reviews here on Amazon. Before I turn to my critique, it has to be said that Naughton makes a fine effort in bringing together the whole context (or at least some sort of plausible context) of "the internet". There are some not uninteresting bits of information on various side issues such as ham radio.

Anyway, as for the core topic -- the internet -- it turns out the book is little more than a mix of pieces taken very much in sequence from the awesome and much underrated Hafner and Lyon book, some actually very funny manual type of sections on things like how to use a browser to click on hyperlinks, and towards the end a little bit of Raymond and Lessig inspired musings about how much open source is better than proprietary software, and how the internet is threatened by corporate giants.

For a serious researcher this book is almost totally useless as an original source of information. Also, there are some strange asides such as on page 147 "'Real e-mail dates from 1970" with a footnote stating that "For some reason, Hafner and Lyon ... date it as 'one day in 1972', but this must be wrong because the RFC archive shows a flurry of discussions of a mail protocol in the summer and autumn of 1971." This explanation makes no sense to me, for there have been all sorts of dead end RFCs, especially in the very early days. I could elaborate the discussion on what qualifies as the "first email ever" much further, but the crucial point is that Naughton offers very little authoritative information and introduces quite a bit of subjectivity on the sources he builds on.

As an aside, don't even waste your time with the Abbate book, just get the Hafner and Lyon book and get to the original sources of the BBN guys, the NWG, Pouzin, Cerf, and the more recent Dave Clark papers on design principles and the internet.

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A Brief History of the Future 15. November 2007

Von Sam Adams - Ver�ffentlicht auf Amazon.com

Format:Gebundene Ausgabe

This book is essentially an overview of the development and evolution of the Internet, ending with the browser war between Netscape and Microsoft. It was initially published in the UK in 1999, then in the US in 2000. There is some discussion of the intellectual backstories such as Norbert Wiener's cybernetics and JCR Licklider's ideas on interactive computing, but the book is mainly about the birth and growth of the Net. This book lacks detail - and is in that sense superficial - but it works well as the general overview the author meant it to be.

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