Rating: 
Summary: Nicely captures the moods of the players and of the times.
Review: This is a very nicely written book. what I especially liked was its choice of the details. The authors are able to choose and stress the important events and link them in a very meaningful and coherent way. Reader never looses the story inspite of its complexity and always feels involved. Great for non-techies and techies alike. Enjoy!
Rating: 
Summary: Internet is older than you thought
Review: This is an excellent book for all those who would guess that Bolt, Beranek and Newman is a law firm. It may sound like one, but it isn't. BBN - now a subsidiary of GTE/Verizon - is a company which is most intimately tied to the birth of what is nowadays known as the internet. And if the BBN's marketing guys would have been half as good as their engineers, we would probably hear a lot more about BBN today and less about, say, Cisco.In a clear and highly readable style, Hafner and Lyon have covered the history of the packet switching networks with encyclopedic breadth. You'll learn both about the early theoretical fathers of packet switching, like Paul Baran and Donald Davies; you have the people in the DoD's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) like Joseph Licklider, Bob Taylor or Larry Roberts, who not only had a grand view of computer networking or obtained the necessary governmental funding, but were also able to specify their wishes precisely enough that the engineers were able to build the network based on their plans. And finally, there is Frank Heart's team at BBN, guys who actually built the darn thing. The subtitle - The origins of the internet - is well chosen. Most of the book focuses on the years 1968-1972, from Roberts' draft proposal, to the 1972 international conference on computer communication. Other development, either earlier or later, is covered only fragmentary. There are other interesting stories, like the origins of USENET, internet news exchange service, but they are not the scope of this book. The book leaves a pleasant impression that the authors actually understand the necessary technical background of the topic they are writing about. Some diagrams might help further, but I am sure that numerous metaphors used in the book will also alone help the casual reader to understand the idea of packet switching. Chapter notes and bibliography section deserve special praise, and the subject index comes in handy, too. Overall, a very satisfying book.
Rating:
Summary: It leaves out the hype but tells a coherent history
Review: This is one of the best books on the history of the Internet I have found. It doesn't make incredibly grandiose and silly statements and it is written in a very clear, straightforward manner. Focusing largely on the early days of the Internet, especially BBN's role in creating the original ARPANET, this book is a pleasant blend of character portraits and technical material, though it is somewhat light on the technical apsects. Still it spent less time than other computer history books on hiring and firing and other rather boring junk. My only gripe with this book is that it peters out right about 1990 and flies over the modern Internet with too little detail. Perhaps that story is best told in a follow-up book. I highly recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Outstanding, wonderful, inspiring, and above all a must read
Review: This is the definitive history of the Internet. Its emphasis is on the Arpanet which has its own rich and very important history.
If you really care about the network you use every day then buy this book.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent history
Review: This is the history of the Internet, from the beginning. There's not a lot of technical detail, just exposition about the major players and how they went about things. Well worth reading for the reading interested in a deeper understanding of how the Internet got started. It also clears up the myth about how the Internet was designed to facilitate communications after a nuclear war. It wasn't. So read this book and understand where the myth came from.
Rating:
Summary: Great book on the history of the internet
Review: This was an excellent account of how the internet was created and how both ARPA and distributed networking has shaped what we use now everyday.. This book provided an excellent account of what the founders of the internet had to deal with in order to design what we have today.. This is a great read and provides a great reference for all who use and depend on the internet...
Rating:
Summary: A True Cybernaut can't NOT read this!
Review: Though this book could have used some more information on the amazing expansion of the net, this book is well done and a must read for any true netizen. It's hard to
believe that the net was little more than an idea in someone's head at one time.
Rating: 
Summary: Why we wrote this book.
Review: To be quite honest, when we started reporting "Wizards" three
years ago, we weren't sure that the story of how Cyberspace was built would interest that many people. But once we began the reporting, we realized it was really a fascinating story--all about new inventions and collaborative
work and simultaneous discoveries and idiosyncratic, ingenious
people.
Now that the book is out, we've been confronted a few times with
the question: why does history matter? Well, we think that history is to society what memory is to individuals. If you wake up with amnesia, you don't have a very
good start on the day. The Net now matters so much to so many
of us. Knowing how it started, and understanding the sensibilities that informed it from the start, should
help us take the technology into the future.
Rating:
Summary: Add Hafner & Lyon to Levy and Stolle as chroniclers of IS ag
Review: We all lived through the Beatles, Jefferson Airplane and the Vietnam War. But what was happening in the new agency called Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA)? And how did they ever come up with this thing called the Internet? This is an important book from a historigraphical perspective. It tells he story of the people who conceived of, and started a network of computers talking to each other. Needless to say, it was not without struggle and frustration. But the level of precision which they demanded assured a lasting legacy.
Besides describing the beginnings of the Internet, the authors describe decisions that went into molding early services, Telnet, FTP and E-Mail.
Hafner & Lyon have guarenteed themselves a place on the shelf along side Steven Levy (Hackers) and Clifford Stolle (The Cuckoo's Egg).
Carl Dolmetsch / Newport News, VA
carld@visi.net
Rating:
Summary: Amazing- Things I didn't know about the company I work for!
Review: What a story. Wonderful and illuminating. I now have greater appreciation and pride in the company I work for and admiraton for the real Wizards who pulled us all into the future. The detail in this book is astounding. So many revelations. A great read.
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