Inventing the Internet

by Janet Abbate

Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internet's design and use. Since the late 1960s the Internet has grown from a single experimental network serving a dozen sites in the United States to a network of networks linking millions of computers worldwide. In Inventing the Internet , Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internets design and use. The story she unfolds is an often twisting tale of collaboration and conflict among a remarkable variety of players, including government and military agencies, computer scientists in academia and industry, graduate students, telecommunications companies, standards organizations, and network users. The story starts with the early networking breakthroughs formulated in Cold War think tanks and realized in the Defense Department's creation of the ARPANET. It ends with the emergence of the Internet and its rapid and seemingly chaotic growth. Abbate looks at how academic and military influences and attitudes shaped both networks; how the usual lines between producer and user of a technology were crossed with interesting and unique results; and how later users invented their own very successful applications, such as electronic mail and the World Wide Web. She concludes that such applications continue the trend of decentralized, user-driven development that has characterized the Internet's entire history and that the key to the Internet's success has been a commitment to flexibility and diversity, both in technical design and in organizational culture.

Genres: History, Technology, Nonfiction, Academic, Computer Science, Computers, Internet

272 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Ry · Rating 3 out of 5]

Title is very literal, mostly interested in the construction of these early computer networks and not how people actually used them once they were built.

Pairs pretty well with Joy Lisi Rankin's "A People's History of Computing"

[Allan Olley · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a relatively short academic history of the assemblage of the technical and institutional elements of the Internet up to about 1995. The focus is on the networking projects of ARPA in particular the arpanet that served as a test bed and basis for much later development, however some other early theoretical work and realized projects in packet switching network are also touched on and other computing networks are discussed, including an extended discussion of the various attempts to codify computer network standards in the 1970s and 80s. The book is focused on broad technical issues but manages to portray how particular financial and other organizational interests shaped the various projects and fights over standards.

While the focus is broadly technical there is almost no time spent on any particular details of the technologies. Likewise there is not much if any detail on user culture, the sort of content transmitted or created on these networks or broader cultural impact of the uses of these. Also as the narrative ends in about 1995 with the release of the Netscape Browser around 1995 with a few later developments barely mentioned. However on the matters of its focus the book is tightly organized, makes good use of sources and skillfully employs ideas from the academic history of technology and computing to illuminate important factors.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

From the early days of the ARPANET, to the World Wide Web, this book traces the invention and evolution of the Internet—a technology increasingly ubiqutous and essential in all wealthy nations. A well-researched and interesting read about how massive government funding combined with a series of coindicences resulted in perhaps the most influentual technology of my generation.

[Hildey · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fantastic

[Katie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“In the late 1960s the field of computer networking was still in its infancy; there was little theory or experience to provide guidance, and computer and communications technologies were in the midst of rapid change. In building the ARPANET, Roberts and other system designers managed this uncertainty by incorporating it as an element of the system. Rather than try to rationalize and neatly plan each aspect of the system, the ARPANET’s builder designed it to accommodate complexity, uncertainty, error, and change. This was done both through technical choices (such as layering) and by making human beings, with their inherent adaptability, and integral part of the system.”

[Rachel]

I read this for school. Not a fan.

[Nick Doty · Rating 4 out of 5]

A history, of infrastructure and of people. Well-presented.

[Levi Hochstetler · Rating 4 out of 5]

Enjoyed the technical parts of how the internet was developed, but some really cool aspects of computing lore were glossed over (like the story of the first transmitted message over the ARPANET: “lo”). However, Abbate does note in the beginning that her book wouldn’t purely be a technical explanation of the Internet, but would focus more on how domestic and foreign culture played a large part in the Internet’s creation and continual advancement. Those sections on culture (near the end) were good. These smart researchers and military people basically created a robust and compatible network international network, but had few ideas to use it for beyond communication and tactical alerts. Seeing how the the users shaped the Internet after the network became privatized was really cool; in particular, the newsgroups, Chatroom apps, and early web browsers like Mosaic.

All in all, a Goodread, but one that took me longer than I would’ve liked for 220 pages

[Hannah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Good read on the origin of the internet.

[Christopher Mitchell · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good introduction to the Internet's early roots with the right amount of technical discussion and the right amount of explanation for how things worked.

[Jack · Rating 4 out of 5]

So, where did the internet come from? As I type this on my laptop on my couch, the question seems almost absurd -- like where does electricity come from. But it turns out that's a pretty interesting story, too.

So , Abbate covers a lot of ground in 200 pages, from the very early days of the computer networking, to evolution of the world-wide web. What she does best is to make it possible to see the world prospectively -- to see it before we know who wins. She does a great job of talking about packet switching, and way in the early 1960's packet switching seemed like a potentially really mediocre idea. She recounts the kicking and screaming with which many of the greats of computer science were forced to join ARPAnet, and gives them a fair hearing. She reminds us that we built the internet largely to build the internet, and many of the initial reasons proved useless and unexpected reasons were why it is so useful to us today. For a while in chapter 5, I was worried I had misremembered what TCP/IP was, because it seemed so obviously not the standard that would become routine.

This ability to help understand history is remarkable, and a rare gift for a writer-- far too much history is really hagiography. She tells a good story. In contrast, her analysis of why some things happened to win is sometimes superficial, and her general observations are not that extensive. So, she sums up:

"The Internet community evolved several principles for reducing chaos and conflicts of interest in a decentralized and heterogeneous system. These included having multiple competing service providers wherever feasible; designing the system to maximize the number of operational decisions that could be made at the local level; and, in cases such as protocol standards where it is necessary to have a single decision-making group, having that group be inclusive and democratic." (p. 208)

Now, those are all good lessons, and some of them are non-trivial. Abbate has a deep faith in the power of decentralized groups of smart people working in good faith, and that is a faith I wish more people had. But the preceding paragraph is a verbatim quote of the vast majority of the high-level analysis of the book. This ain't sociology. If you want a book of "lessons from the Internet", rather than a news-like account of the growth of it, this is not the book for you. But if you want to know the story and sort out some lessons for yourself, this is a fine read.

[Aaron Becker · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janet Abbate's Inventing the Internet contextualizes early developments in computer networking technology, allowing people who weren't there (read: alive yet) to understand what the earliest network users found in a system that was almost incomprehensibly primitive by today's standards. Abbate points out, to the initial puzzlement of someone teethed in AOL chatrooms, that networking technology was never "destined" to be as indispensable as it is today. As part of a generation that views internet technology's simplicity as a given, learning the historical development of computer networking illuminated technical details and structural concepts of which I had only been vaguely aware. I never knew, for instance, that TCP/IP was a controversial technology among the international bodies that set standards for the nascent Internet, or that the earliest networks were designed according to fundamentally different organization schemes. Contemporary standards appear so ubiquitous that the debates out of which they grew have faded into memory-- Abbate taps into those memories to reconstruct the intellectual environment that gave rise to the internet we now take for granted.
The only thing I found lacking in this book was a glossary of acronyms-- there are dozens of them, and keeping track of their meanings and connections often required a good deal of page turning.

[Jeffrey Hart · Rating 5 out of 5]

The is the best book I have read about the early history of the Internet. Based on correspondence and interviews with the key people, Abbate provides clear answers to many of the questions that surround that history. For example, to what extent was the research supported by the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency responsible for how the Internet evolved and to what extent was ARPA's support driven by military/defense concerns? How did the TCP/IP protocols win out over the proprietary networks developed by the big computer companies? How did the ARPANET become the Internet (evolving from a network of defense contractors to a network for businesses and individuals)? This book is a must read for anyone who wants to understand how we got here.

[Benjamin Malnor · Rating 4 out of 5]

Janet Abbate does a great job explaining all the people and organizations involved with the creation of the internet. From networks to the computer programming Janet gives an all encompassing picture of factors that led to the creation of the internet. I'm not very networking/programming/computer science savvy so I can't speak to the technical accuracy of her book but I can say that I walked away with a much greater appreciation for all the research and coordination that was required to give the internet its success.

[Julia · Rating 3 out of 5]

This exquisitely researched social history guides its reader through a dizzying array of abbreviations and acronyms and will leave any one passionate about the Internet with a thorough understanding of the social, political, and economic history of its development.

[Rahmad · Rating 4 out of 5]

An easy and good history of how the Internet came to be.

[mcburton · Rating 4 out of 5]

No one else has written a history of the Internet because this account is so thorough.

[Sridhar Jammalamadaka · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It narrates the history of internet.

[Lulu · Rating 5 out of 5]

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