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Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet Kindle Edition

4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 607 ratings

Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone.
In the 1960's, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R. Licklider at MIT saw them as the ultimate communications devices. With Defense Department funds, he and a band of visionary computer whizzes began work on a nationwide, interlocking network of computers. Taking readers behind the scenes,
Where Wizards Stay Up Late captures the hard work, genius, and happy accidents of their daring, stunningly successful venture.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Considering that the history of the Internet is perhaps better documented internally than any other technological construct, it is remarkable how shadowy its origins have been to most people, including die-hard Net-denizens!

At last, Hafner and Lyon have written a well-researched story of the origins of the Internet substantiated by extensive interviews with its creators who delve into many interesting details such as the controversy surrounding the adoption of our now beloved "@" sign as the separator of usernames and machine addresses. Essential reading for anyone interested in the past -- and the future -- of the Net specifically, and telecommunications generally.

From Publishers Weekly

Hafner, coauthor of Cyberpunk, and Lyon, assistant to the president of the University of Texas, here unveil the Sputnik-era beginnings of the Internet, the groundbreaking scientific work that created it and the often eccentric, brilliant scientists and engineers responsible. Originally funded during the Eisenhower administration by IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office) within the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor, was devised as a way to share far-flung U.S. computer resources at a time when computers were wildly expensive, room-sized bohemoths unable to communicate with any other. The husband-and-wife writing team profile the computer engineering firm of Bolt Baranek and Newman, which produced the original prototypes for ARPANET, and they profile the men (there were virtually no women) and an alphabet soup of agencies, universities and software that made the Internet possible. And while the book attempts to debunk the conventional notion that ARPANET was devised primarily as a communications link that could survive nuclear war (essentially it was not), pioneer developers like Paul Baran (who, along, with British Scientist Donald Davies devised the Internet's innovative packet-switching message technology) recognized the importance of an indestructible message medium in an age edgy over the prospects of global nuclear destruction. The book is excellent at enshrining little known but crucial scientist/administrators like Bob Taylor, Larry Roberts and Joseph Licklider, many of whom laid the groundwork for the computer science industry.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • ASIN ‏ : ‎ B000FC0WP6
  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Simon & Schuster (August 19, 1999)
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ August 19, 1999
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • File size ‏ : ‎ 961 KB
  • Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
  • Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Not Enabled
  • Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 304 pages
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.5 4.5 out of 5 stars 607 ratings

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Customer reviews

4.5 out of 5 stars
607 global ratings

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Customers say

Customers find the book easy to read and understand. They appreciate its history, information quality, and human side. The book provides a valuable resource for networking and hardware creation. Readers mention that the book is entertaining with good jokes.

AI-generated from the text of customer reviews

63 customers mention "Readability"58 positive5 negative

Customers find the book easy to read and understandable. They say it provides in-depth details about hardware, software, Internet policy, and visions for the future. The story is interesting and the technical details keep them engaged. Readers consider it a must-read for anyone who uses the Internet and for technology enthusiasts.

"Nice story about people who started an Internet revolution, challenges, their thoughts about specific problems on this journey, team spirit in..." Read more

"...“narrarator”, if there was one, disappeared completely but told an interesting story...." Read more

"...It is exceptionally well written and researched. The history its sharing is amusing and especially considering the impact of the decisions made back..." Read more

"...was made and put together, this is the book that is easy to read and understand and will help you see the providence that combined to make this..." Read more

28 customers mention "History"28 positive0 negative

Customers find the book helpful for understanding the history of the Internet and networking. It provides a comprehensive overview of the early days of packet switching and computer history. The book provides organized historical information that builds upon the foundations, including early papers that are now considered historical documents.

"...It is about the very beginning of the Internet, not so much how it came together after ARPANET...." Read more

"...There's a lot of important, historical information organized here, which makes it a valuable resource...." Read more

"This book was an excellent history of the people, ideas, and technologies that gave rise to the modern Internet. It was also riveting...." Read more

"The book Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet is a great read if you enjoy knowing the history of common place objects today...." Read more

22 customers mention "Information quality"22 positive0 negative

Customers find the book informative and insightful. They describe it as a valuable resource, well-researched, and a foundational text on its topic. The book provides enough human interest and technical detail to keep readers engaged. It expands their perspectives regarding achievement and is relevant to 21st-century life.

"...I think it reached a good balance between the people, events, and technology...." Read more

"...I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is exceptionally well written and researched...." Read more

"...to make this invention that will save the planet and lead mankind to the stars possible." Read more

"...historical information organized here, which makes it a valuable resource. However, it was a pretty dense and sometimes difficult read...." Read more

7 customers mention "Human side"7 positive0 negative

Customers find the book relatable and engaging. They appreciate the realistic portrayal of people, their personalities, strengths, and weaknesses. The book provides a balanced view of history and current events, with attention to detail.

"...I think it reached a good balance between the people, events, and technology...." Read more

"...The book makes real people out of the original engineers and programmers and showed how they thought, what they did to overcome their problems, and..." Read more

"...The events are easy to picture and the people are real. The book is understandable and very easy to follow...." Read more

"...The writing shows the humorous and human side of very serious and very intelligent engineers and technologists of the highest order...." Read more

5 customers mention "Entertainment value"5 positive0 negative

Customers find the book entertaining and humorous. They appreciate the author's jokes and how it immerses them in the office of the creators.

"...It was entertaining without being “popular”, and historical without being “academic”...." Read more

""Where the wizards stay up late" is an excellent, funny and easy to read description about the history of the internet...." Read more

"Essential. Fundamental. Encyclopedic. Fun...." Read more

"The book is very interesting and entertaining. The reader would learn about how internet and network communication was invented by few bright people." Read more

4 customers mention "Networking"4 positive0 negative

Customers find the book helpful for learning about networking and hardware creation. They appreciate the detailed coverage of the early history and development of packet switching networking, aka ARPANET. Readers also mention the intimately revealed story of creating a connected universe.

"...and experienced computer- and network- experts...." Read more

"Fantastic book on the early history and the development of "packet switching" networking - aka ARPANET...." Read more

"...Encyclopedic. Fun. Here is the step-by-step, intimately revealed creation of a connected...well, universe—the story of how every little bit becomes..." Read more

"Nice book, read easy, every nerd should read. Networking and hardware creation. Recomended...." Read more

Top reviews from the United States

  • Reviewed in the United States on November 29, 2024
    Nice story about people who started an Internet revolution, challenges, their thoughts about specific problems on this journey, team spirit in different companies and institutions which were involved. Valuable testimony of a specific era in network and information technology development.
  • Reviewed in the United States on September 19, 2018
    Excellent and entertaining social history of BBN, ARPANET, and the Internet. I think it reached a good balance between the people, events, and technology. It was entertaining without being “popular”, and historical without being “academic”. For me, the book did a good job of taking me back in time and seeing things from that perspective of those times, rather than from the author’s point of view, or ours today. The “narrarator”, if there was one, disappeared completely but told an interesting story. It is a shame that BBN and the engineers are not better known, considering the importance of their contributions. It is about the very beginning of the Internet, not so much how it came together after ARPANET. It gave me a new perspective on the Boston area where I lived for several years. I looked the BBN campus up on the net, and you can still see where it all started.
    4 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on July 12, 2009
    "Where the wizards stay up late" is an excellent, funny and easy to read description about the history of the internet. It is well researched and engaging.

    The book consists of eight chapters about the creation of the ArpaNet, the predecessor of the Internet. It starts with describing the creation of the ARPA research organization in the US government, the people influencal to that creation and the description of Licklider, the early head of the agency which was so influencal to the creation on the net.

    The second chapter discusses the creation of the concept of packet-switching by Paul Baran and Donald Davies and how this was, early on, ignored by most of the rest of the world. Especially the attitude of AT&T is, in retrospective, of course quite amusing. The third chapter talks about the history of BBN, which was the company that build the first 'routers' (called IMPs) for the first network. And how this small company won the contract for building the ARPANET.

    The book continues with the creation of the first IMP for the UCLA and how the company had trouble with the early Honeywell computers that were used as a basis. The early computers had a bug in their synchronization which caused the machine to be much less reliable than needed. Honeywell couldn't believe how reliable BBN wanted the machine to be. Quite amusing. The following chapter covers the history of Steve Crocker and Vint Cerf. Vint created (with Kahn) later the TCP and IP protocols, Steve was the author of the first RFC--the way internet standards are described and how they have been evolved.

    The sixth chapter describes the creation of more IMPs and how the ARPANET gradually grew... and the problems that caused. How the FTP protocol was created (and the mail protocol hacked in the FTP protocol) and how they showed off the ARPANET during a small conference (and AT&T still not believing in the concept). The next chapter covers Email. The creation of Email and how it became the major usage of the network early on. Especially interesting are the discussions about mail headers and inconsistency. At least it demonstrations that easy agreement in creating the internet protocols is an illusion, it took a lot of discussion and a long time.

    The final chapter goes in a faster pace and explains how Cerf/Kahn created the IP protocol and implemented that on other networks and how the NFS created a new network gradually linking more and more networks together and creating the Internet. Amusing to read was how the ARPANET actually became more and more a government DOD network and that it, in a sense, was NOT the 'father' network of the internet (depending on how you define father... it wasn't the first network to be linked up). Also the story of the creating of Ethernet and the fight between OSI and TCP/IP are amusing. The book ends with a small epilogue describing the 25th anniversary of BBN for the creating of the first IMP.
    I thoroughly enjoyed this book. It is exceptionally well written and researched. The history its sharing is amusing and especially considering the impact of the decisions made back then in the world today. This book is definitely worth reading for anyone interested in computer science, networking and its history. A must read.
    11 people found this helpful
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  • Reviewed in the United States on April 16, 2019
    I am a Gen-X I.T. guy. I was raised from the time personal computers were thousands of dollars and were bought by offices to allow their employees to have primitive word processing programs and maybe a simple calculator. For all computers to be linked together and able to talk to each other, share information, locate problems between them, and enable human beings a new facility to communicate in addition to humankind's speech, hearing, touch, and thought that becomes a new basic ability for us just as these others are. (Who could go a day without texts or email messages coming to them to realize their new place in the world?). This book takes the birth of the Internet--what preceded it, what promoted it, what was required to be invented so it could fulfill its purpose--and tells it in interviews with the founding fathers (there were not founding women based on the culture of the time) and goes back through records and accomplishments that led piece by piece to the network of networks we have today. The book makes real people out of the original engineers and programmers and showed how they thought, what they did to overcome their problems, and how they worked together as teams to come up with one of the most important intelligence-expanding discoveries in the history of the human race. This book is written for both computer-neophytes (gives definitions of the terms and vocabulary used that even casual computer users will find relevant in today's computer-oriented world) and experienced computer- and network- experts. Without the products of these inventors and geniuses, the connected world we have today where practically everyone in non-third-world countries has access to a computer and the Internet, the connectedness we enjoy as a world full of people would not be present to the extent it is today. For anyone wanting to understand how this most significant discovery was made and put together, this is the book that is easy to read and understand and will help you see the providence that combined to make this invention that will save the planet and lead mankind to the stars possible.
    19 people found this helpful
    Report

Top reviews from other countries

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  • Amazon Customer
    3.0 out of 5 stars Unacceptable print quality
    Reviewed in the Netherlands on September 2, 2023
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    Amazon Customer
    3.0 out of 5 stars Unacceptable print quality
    Reviewed in the Netherlands on September 2, 2023

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  • Etienne A.
    5.0 out of 5 stars I loved this book - although it is not perfect and ...
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on May 22, 2018
    I loved this book - even if it is not perfect and is definitely a bit nerdy. Although it would need to be updated in a second edition, I found the history of the net fascinating. Now I really want to understand the technical details of networking, which I should have done years ago.
  • Bruno L
    5.0 out of 5 stars excellent read!
    Reviewed in Canada on June 25, 2015
    a must for those interested in computers/internet history
  • Oscar
    5.0 out of 5 stars Una interesantísima narración histórica sobre la creación del embrión de Internet
    Reviewed in Spain on January 23, 2016
    Me ha gustado especialmente la parte relacionada con el diseño y creación de los IMP --los precursores de los actuales "routers". Aunque también me lo compré en papel y en libro electrónico, lo seguí principalmente en la versión en audiolibro que compré en (...) (pertenece a Amazon). Creo que lo disfrutrarán todos aquellos que tengan conocimientos técnicos relacionados con Internet, sobre todo si les gusta conocer la intrahistoria de los acontecimientos.
  • jcf-42
    5.0 out of 5 stars histoire
    Reviewed in France on June 21, 2014
    L'informatique est certes jeune mais il y a déjà de quoi écrire son histoire.
    La création d'Internet en est un épisode majeur et ce livre la raconte brillamment.
    À recommander (ou à offrir) à tous les passionnés d'informatique.

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