Inventing the Internet (Inside Technology)

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.

Describes how academe and the military shaped the early history of the Internet, and how later users invented such successful application as e-mail and the World Wide Web.

Publishers Weekly

The prehistory of the Internet--meaning the period including Gopher and WAIS but before the World Wide Web--is often recounted among wonks but unknown to most others. Abbate, a history lecturer at the University of Maryland, traces the conversion of the ARPANET, a project of the Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency created to allow scientists to run computers remotely, to the World Wide Web, an application created by a Swiss CERN physicist in the early 1990s for transmitting sound and pictures along with text, with a number of stages along the way. From the opening discussion of "packet switching," a major innovation in information exchange, Abbate makes it clear that "technical standards can be used as social and political instruments," and that hardware and software architecture is as much a product of social formations as the other way around. ARPANET was created at the height of the Cold War so that military communications could be maintained in the event of nuclear exchange, but the scientists who created it, in true Kuhnian fashion, used a loose set of ideas about end user-driven computing to overturn conventional wisdom. The book, firmly academic, has the feel of an extremely well-written doctoral dissertation and is thus unable to avoid being freighted with the acronyms and the inherent complexity of its subject. While most readers won't care about CCITT standards or how TCP/IP works, they will find themselves at least curious about the people who created them. (Aug.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Abate Sees The Key To The Internet's Rapid And Seemingly Chaotic Growth As The Result Of A Decentralized, User-driven Environment. She Traces The Development Of Networked Resources From Cold War Think Tanks And The Arpanet To The Present Successful Free-form Applications. White Heat And Cold War : The Origins And Meanings Of Packet -- Building The Arpanet : Challenges And Strategies -- The Most Neglected Element : Users Transform The Arpanet -- From Arpanet To Internet -- The Internet In The International Standards Arena -- Popularizing The Internet. Janet Abbate. Includes Bibliographical References (p. [241]-258) And Index. "In Inventing the Internet, Janet Abbate focuses on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internet's design and use. She unfolds 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."--Jacket.