Why am I passionate about this?
I’m a researcher, writer, and designer who has spent most of the past twenty-five years working in the technology industry, following an earlier career as a journalist and academic librarian. I've developed an abiding interest in the history of knowledge networks. I've written two books on the history of the information age, as well as a number of newspaper and magazine articles on new and emerging technologies. While the technology industry often seems to have little use for its own history, I have found the history of networked systems to be a rich source of inspiration, full of sources of inspiration that can help us start to envision a wide range of possible futures.
Alex's book list on forgotten pioneers of the Internet
Why did Alex love this book?
Engelbart’s seminal 1962 book on the possibilities of networked computers builds directly on Bush’s ideas, laying out a groundbreaking new vision for how computers might work.
In collaboration with a team of brilliant collaborators at the Stanford Research Institute, Englelbart began to outline a revolutionary vision for a new kind of collaboration between people and computers. He argued for a new class of technology that would enable computers to augment—rather than supplant—human intelligence. Engelbart’s work led directly to the invention of the graphical user interface, hyperlinking, and pointing devices like the mouse (another Engelbart invention).
Though little read today, Augmenting Human Intellect has exerted a lasting impact on contemporary computing, and many computer scientists now acknowledge it as one of the intellectual foundations of the modern Internet.
4 authors picked The Victorian Internet as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
A new paperback edition of the book the Wall Street Journal dubbed “a Dot-Com cult classic,” by the bestselling author of A History of the World in 6 Glasses-the fascinating story of the telegraph, the world's first “Internet.”
The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts…