Segaller, Stephen. Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet. New York: TV Books, 1999. 412 pages.

This book grew out of a public television documentary and is based on more than seventy interviews with Internet pioneers. It is comprehensive and well-written, although some hype seeps though occasionally, as might be expected from any book written at the peak of the dot-com boom. But the effect is minimal, since this book deals mostly with events that occurred before our overeager mass media even knew that the Internet existed.

The story begins in 1957 with the launching of Sputnik, which sent shivers up the spines of the cold warriors. Money began pouring from the defense establishment into open-ended technical research and education. ARPA-funded university nerds developed digital communications protocols, and started a modest network; RAND and the Stanford Research Institute were also involved. Later the Palo Alto Research Center, a unique nerdy think tank owned by Xerox, played an important role. Soon after an affordable microprocessor chip appeared in 1974, the PhD nerds were eclipsed by the homebrew computer nerds. Over the next twenty years, everything got twice as fast, with twice the memory, and half as expensive, over and over again every few years. This book focuses on personalities, but the Internet was mostly driven by advances in hardware. The people involved, while quaint and capable, merely happened to be in the right place at the right time.
ISBN 1-57500-088-1

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