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Rating: 
Summary: Excellent read!
Review: At a time when the world is undergoing an explosion in telecommunication traffic and the internet is reshaping the way we communicate and do business, it is difficult to not be awed at the technologies, the companies and the people who have made this revolution possible. "Getting the message..." is a timely and insightful look at the people and events that have lead up to the present day information revolution. For experts and laymen alike, this book provides an excellent and entertaining historical overview of the developments of the technologies from the early concepts of smoke and light signals to the modern day invention of fiber optic communication. By placing telecommunication technology in its proper historical perspective, the readers who are experts in the field (telecommunications engineers, scientist and managers) and who currently work on the new new thing that will make the bandwidth utopia a future reality, are rewarded with a sense of connectivity to the past and a better sense of purpose. For the laymen, this book excels in covering in easy to understand language the basic technology concepts that underlie the physical concepts of the transportation of information. In short, this book was a riveting read. Anyone who is remotely interested in telecommuncations should get it.
Rating: 
Summary: Very interesting book
Review: Being a budding communications enthusiast, I eagerly anticipated reading Mr. Solymar's book "Getting The Message: The History of Communications" after receiving it from Amazon.com. Mr. Solymar, in his own review, invites the readers to critique his newest book and to show him where it succeeded for them, or failed them. Very well, Professor. For this reader, Prof. Solymar's success lies in his thorough research of his material, his erudition and timeliness concerning the subject matter in the amazing progress in the field of communications. As he has rightly pointed out, the cost of a long-distance call has dropped from prohibitively expensive in the 20s to just pennies a minute in some areas. His examples of early methods of communicating by fire, semaphore, and telegraph are historically interesting. And you've got to hand it to the man for devoting an entire chapter to the development of fax alone. The fact that fax machines, however crude, were in existence in the early/mid 19th century boggles the mind. Especially when you consider that Alexander Bain had the idea of fax transmissions and was working on the same BEFORE Samuel Morse's telegraph! And finally, he leaves TV and radio braodcasts alone, since they are not one-to-one methods of communication. As for where Mr. Solymar has failed, I was somewhat disappointed in the rather academic treatment of the subject. Not as entertaining as Tom Standage's "The Victorian Internet", but at least not as condescending as Sir Arthur Clarke's "How The World Was One", but rather a bridge between the two. Mr. Solymar seems to be writing a technical book at times and a layman's guide at others - mercifully, he spares us a "For Dummies" approach. This book seems to be for the reader of "Scientific American" or "Popular Science" magazines. And it is here where the book both shines and does not at the same time. For, while point-to-point communication is covered quite competently, Mr. Solymar fails to address the more popular current trends of communications such as instant messaging, cell phone/beeper text messages, Palm-like devices --all the rage in Japan and Europe. In fact, the book does not really address the social effects of all these evolving ways to communicate. In her book "The Death of Distance", for example, Frances Cairncross offers us a little tidbit about how Japanese schoolgirls send "sweet dreams" messages to one another using text beepers, among her dull statistics and fact-crunching. His predictions for the future are no more or less valid than anyone else's, but only time will tell. With all the way cool gizmos going wireless, we seem to be, at the beginning of the 21st century, repeating the early 20th century when "wireless" was the buzzword of the day as well. Perhaps in the next edition of this book, Professor Solymar will include things like Bluetooth and other ideas being used to broaden our communications horizons -- maybe even Amazon's author-reader dialogue opportunities, as well. How about it, Professor?
Rating:
Summary: Very interesting book
Review: Being a budding communications enthusiast, I eagerly anticipated reading Mr. Solymar's book "Getting The Message: The History of Communications" after receiving it from Amazon.com. Mr. Solymar, in his own review, invites the readers to critique his newest book and to show him where it succeeded for them, or failed them. Very well, Professor. For this reader, Prof. Solymar's success lies in his thorough research of his material, his erudition and timeliness concerning the subject matter in the amazing progress in the field of communications. As he has rightly pointed out, the cost of a long-distance call has dropped from prohibitively expensive in the 20s to just pennies a minute in some areas. His examples of early methods of communicating by fire, semaphore, and telegraph are historically interesting. And you've got to hand it to the man for devoting an entire chapter to the development of fax alone. The fact that fax machines, however crude, were in existence in the early/mid 19th century boggles the mind. Especially when you consider that Alexander Bain had the idea of fax transmissions and was working on the same BEFORE Samuel Morse's telegraph! And finally, he leaves TV and radio braodcasts alone, since they are not one-to-one methods of communication. As for where Mr. Solymar has failed, I was somewhat disappointed in the rather academic treatment of the subject. Not as entertaining as Tom Standage's "The Victorian Internet", but at least not as condescending as Sir Arthur Clarke's "How The World Was One", but rather a bridge between the two. Mr. Solymar seems to be writing a technical book at times and a layman's guide at others - mercifully, he spares us a "For Dummies" approach. This book seems to be for the reader of "Scientific American" or "Popular Science" magazines. And it is here where the book both shines and does not at the same time. For, while point-to-point communication is covered quite competently, Mr. Solymar fails to address the more popular current trends of communications such as instant messaging, cell phone/beeper text messages, Palm-like devices --all the rage in Japan and Europe. In fact, the book does not really address the social effects of all these evolving ways to communicate. In her book "The Death of Distance", for example, Frances Cairncross offers us a little tidbit about how Japanese schoolgirls send "sweet dreams" messages to one another using text beepers, among her dull statistics and fact-crunching. His predictions for the future are no more or less valid than anyone else's, but only time will tell. With all the way cool gizmos going wireless, we seem to be, at the beginning of the 21st century, repeating the early 20th century when "wireless" was the buzzword of the day as well. Perhaps in the next edition of this book, Professor Solymar will include things like Bluetooth and other ideas being used to broaden our communications horizons -- maybe even Amazon's author-reader dialogue opportunities, as well. How about it, Professor?
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