Where Wizards Stay Up Late

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyons purports, from its subtitle, to be about "The Origins of the Internet." Which it is. Alas, eighty percent of the book is about the mechanics of setting up the ARPAnet --- the existence of ARPA, the history of Boston consulting house Bolt, Baranek and Newman, the exchange of talent between MIT, Lincoln Labs, and Digital Equipment Corporation, the personal histories of some of the folks involved, the development of the first Interface Message Processors, which made the ARPAnet possible. It's only in the last chapter that they cover Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn inventing TCP/IP, the protocol that made it possible to connect the various computer networks together, Bill Joy's implementation of TCP/IP for Berkeley Unix, and the true birth of the Internet. I was initially dismayed by this imbalance, until I realized that the development of the other networks --- CSnet, the regional academic networks, NEARnet, SATnet, Alohanet --- is much the same story. The connection of those networks together into the Internet is just the application of technology. The real story, the real history, is in the invention of packet switching and the visionaries who decided to put together the original ARPAnet.