Overview
Millions tuned into the Internet to access the Starr Report. Now Nerds 2.0.1, the first detailed history of computer networking, tells the dramatic story of how we have come to be wired together by the Internet and the World Wide Web.Stephen Segaller's timely book draws on detailed interviews with more than seventy of the pioneers who have user their technological genius and business skills to make incompatible systems work together, to make networking user-friendly, and to create a new global communications medium that rivals the telephone system or television in its scope and reach.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
The Barnes & Noble ReviewIn the 1960s, the personal computer wasn't yet on every desktop, a URL was part of another word for hot rollers, and mainframe computers were huge and costly. It was this costliness that first inspired Bob Taylor, who worked at the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), to think about ways to link computers together. This way, programs could be shared over the networks, and people who were clamoring for the highest-end machines would be able to use sophisticated programs that didn't cost any money.
What Taylor set in motion was known from then on as ARPAnet, and over time, it mutated into the network that's on everyone's lips these days, the network that you're reading this on: the Internet. Nerds 2.0.1 is an oral history of that network, told by those who were on the front lines: The big names, such as Steve Jobs and Steve Case, are present, as are the denizens of pioneering online systems like the Well and workers at "hot" start-up companies that seem to be the Internet's biggest contribution to the 1990s financial landscape.
The story of the Internet actually seems to be one of a series of happy accidents; both the creation of ARPAnet and Tim Berners-Lee's invention of the hypertext protocol, also known as the World Wide Web, were born of necessity — the necessity of making huge jobs a little bit easier to organize and work through. Although both original frameworks are wholly different now (could you imagine the Web today without pictures, without fancy rollovers, without even different backgrounds?), the intent behind them remains the same:Theynetwork people who may be sitting in the cube next to one another or an ocean apart. Nerds 2.0.1 is the story behind the Internet's creation, and the story of how necessity can be the cause of the most effective innovations.