|
|
Hafner, Katie ListingsIf you cannot find what you want on this page, then please use our search feature to search all our listings. Click on Title to view full description
|
|
|
1 |
WHERE WIZARDS STAY UP LATE: THE STORY BEHIND THE CREATION OF THE INTERNET
Hafner, Katie
1996 18359 ABOUT THE BOOK Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Story behind the Creation of the Internet FROM OUR EDITORS Was ARPAnet, the Internet's precursor, built in the 1960s as a means of surviving a nuclear attack? The reality of the Internet's history is weirder than the myth! (This copy refers to a book club edition.) ANNOTATION This is the fascinating, never-before-told story of the young geniuses who created the first electronic network, predecessor of the Internet, the technological marvel that has transformed communications in our time. of photos. Online forums. FROM THE PUBLISHER A little more than twenty-five years ago, computer networks did not exist anywhere - except in the minds of a handful of computer scientists. In the late 1960s, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency funded a project to create computer communication among its university-based researchers. The experiment was inspired by J. C. R. Licklider, a brilliant scientist from MIT. At a time when computers were generally regarded as nothing more than giant calculators, Licklider saw their potential as communications devices. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the story of the small group of researchers and engineers whose invention, daring in its day, became the foundation for the Internet. With ARPA's backing, Licklider and others began the quest for a way to connect computers across the country. In 1969, ARPA awarded the contract to build the most integral piece of this network - a computerized switch called the Interface Message Processor, or IMP - to Bolt Beranek and Newman (BBN), a small Cambridge, Massachusetts, company. A half-dozen engineers at BBN, who called themselves the IMP Guys, knew it was possible to do what larger companies - including AT&T and IBM - had dismissed as impossible. But making computer networking possible required inventing new technologies. Working around the clock, the IMP Guys met a tight deadline, and the first IMP was installed at UCLA nine months after the contract award. A nationwide network called the ARPANET grew from four initial sites. Protocols were developed, and along the way a series of accidental discoveries were made, not the least of which was e-mail. Almost immediately, e-mail became the most popular feature of the Net and the "@" sign became lodged in the iconography of our times. The ARPANET continued to grow, then merged with other computer networks to become today's Internet. In 1990, the ARPANET itself was shut down, fully merged by then with the Internet it had spawned. SYNOPSIS Just out in paperback, Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet tells the complex story of the invention of the Internet and the group of visionary computer whizzes responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough of our times. FROM THE CRITICS Publishers Weekly Hafner, coauthor of Cyberpunk, and Lyon, assistant to the president of the University of Texas, here unveil the Sputnik-era beginnings of the Internet, the groundbreaking scientific work that created it and the often eccentric, brilliant scientists and engineers responsible. Originally funded during the Eisenhower administration by IPTO (Information Processing Techniques Office) within the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA), ARPANET, the Internet's predecessor, was devised as a way to share far-flung U.S. computer resources at a time when computers were wildly expensive, room-sized bohemoths unable to communicate with any other. The husband-and-wife writing team profile the computer engineering firm of Bolt Baranek and Newman, which produced the original prototypes for ARPANET, and they profile the men (there were virtually no women) and an alphabet soup of agencies, universities and software that made the Internet possible. And while the book attempts to debunk the conventional notion that ARPANET was devised primarily as a communications link that could survive nuclear war (essentially it was not), pioneer developers like Paul Baran (wh Simon & Schuster Adult Publishing Group 0-684-81201-0 / 9780684812014
Hardcover As New Riverside, New Jersey, U.S.A.
Price:
15.75 USD
|
|
Add to Shopping Cart Now (Easily removed if you change your mind!) |
|
|
|
