The authors write an informative and interesting book that details
the history and progression of the Internet from the time the concept
was formed to the time just before the Internet exploded due to
AOL and Netscape. And the authors do this without slowing the
story down with too much technical detail.
The book reveals that it was J.C.R. Licklider, a psychologist who
was introduced to computers in the 1950s, who had this vision of
computers as a technological tool by which people, average citizens,
would be able to be informed and communicate with others. Computers
coupled with televisions would be a main source of medium that would
link citizens who were geographically distant. Licklider had this
vision at a time when computers were large, bulky, hard to use,
and weak in comparison to today's laptops. But he was right on the
money with his vision as the Internet Age exploded on us today.
The authors cover the source and the details of several concepts
very important to the Internet. One is Paul Baran's theory of
packet-switching networks. Baran came up with this because he
thought there was a need for a redundant, reliable communication
system to survive a nuclear war. This packet-switching concept
became the concept of the Internet. However, the Internet was
first started not to survive a nuclear war but to allow various
ARPA (Advanced Research Project Agency) research sites to share
expensive computers. It was Bob Taylor, director of the
Information Processing Techniques Office (IPTO) of ARPA, who first
came up with the idea to create a network. He cajoled Larry
Roberts, a computer scientist at Lincoln Labs in Massachusetts,
to be the project lead.
These two picked up Baran's concept
of packet-switching when AT&T laughed off Baran's concept as
unfeasable.
To implement the first network, the company BBN (Bolt, Beranek, and
Newman) was hired. Wes Clark came up with the idea of interface
message processors (IMPs), simple computers acting like routers
in the Internet. BBN created the first IMPs and the prototype
of the Internet, the ARPANET, was formed at four sites, UC Santa
Barbara, UCLA, University of Utah, and Stanford Research Institute.
Later, more sites were added.
Along the way, new ideas came about. TCP/IP, a new protocol that
allowed a standard way to send messages and to handle routing,
was formed and distributed. It became the standard on the
Internet. Bob Metcalfe, a Harvard grad student, studied a
radio-based network in Hawaii and recombined the concepts to
create the Ethernet, something Xerox would market and something
that would fuel the Local Area Network explosion.
But along the way of successes in Internet history came marked
failures. AT&T had an opportunity to get into the network market
at a time when AT&T was a powerful monopoly and the Internet
was a fledging idea. Later, when ARPA wanted to spin off their
net (ARPANET), it was offered to AT&T but AT&T again turned it
down, a colossal mistake. IBM too refused. If either had taken
advantage of ARPANET, they would have made their mark on the
huge Internet business and been able to set the standards. Instead,
other companies saw the opportunities that they were blind to.
Companies like BBN, which first made and installed the first
routers, didn't get into the router business because a marketing
manager didn't think there was a future in it. Again, companies
like Cisco, 3COM, and Synoptics filled that vacuum.
This book complemented the Computer Networks class I took in
college (the class book was COMPUTER NETWORKS by
Andrew Tanenbaum ). But
it was general enough for the layman. Anybody who is interested
in learning a little background on the Internet should read this
book. If not for the Internet, you wouldn't be reading this
review.