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Nerds 2.0.1
A companion book to the PBS television series chronicles the thirty-year development of the Internet from its beginnings as a cold war effort to build a network of government computers in order to save money
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First published January 1, 1998
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
June 25, 2021
So I know about 1/4 ro 1/3 the people on the photo dust jacket. While the book has flaws, it's a surprisingly good informal history of the early ARPAnet and Internet. I have the hardbound.
The book is mostly a synopsis of 3 hour the Oregon PBS documentary of the same title. That documentary was a sequel to Robert Cringely's book Accidental Empires which was made into the 3 hour OPB documentary Triumph of the Nerds (about hobbyist hackers who jump start the home computer industry). You can find these documentaries on YouTube and elsewhere including OPB.
I never heard of Segaller before seeing this book.
As a person to lived some of the events mentioned in the book on the side lines: you really had to be there. This was the kind of experience who send you kids to college to experience. To this events from decades back, I still use some of them. I met Taylor before he passed away, and I only say Kahn and Cerf a year ago at an ALOHAnet history event. And I can assure that that IBM and AT&T poo-pooed the net as did others in places like NASA and the DOD. Ain't hindsight wonderful?
It also has to be recalled that most programmers in that era were still using punchcards and that interactive computing was wasteful of machine cycles. Memory was expensive. It was amazing what you could accomplish at 56.600 bits per second (bPS).
The book is mostly a synopsis of 3 hour the Oregon PBS documentary of the same title. That documentary was a sequel to Robert Cringely's book Accidental Empires which was made into the 3 hour OPB documentary Triumph of the Nerds (about hobbyist hackers who jump start the home computer industry). You can find these documentaries on YouTube and elsewhere including OPB.
I never heard of Segaller before seeing this book.
As a person to lived some of the events mentioned in the book on the side lines: you really had to be there. This was the kind of experience who send you kids to college to experience. To this events from decades back, I still use some of them. I met Taylor before he passed away, and I only say Kahn and Cerf a year ago at an ALOHAnet history event. And I can assure that that IBM and AT&T poo-pooed the net as did others in places like NASA and the DOD. Ain't hindsight wonderful?
It also has to be recalled that most programmers in that era were still using punchcards and that interactive computing was wasteful of machine cycles. Memory was expensive. It was amazing what you could accomplish at 56.600 bits per second (bPS).
October 20, 2021
Dubbed "A Brief History of the Internet", this is a 350 page book which takes us from the 1960s to the end of the 1990s, telling the story of all of the major names who contributed to make the internet what it is: Doug Engelbart, JCR Licklider and Len Kleinrock from ARPA; Bob Taylor, director at ARPA and founder of Xerox PARC; the team at Bolt, Beranek & Newman who designed and implemented the machines which formed the backbone of what would become the internet; Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, co-inventors of TCP/IP; Ted Nelson, Jon Postel, Bob Metcalfe, Gordon Moore and many others.
The Internet is more than just a story of technology, it is the culmination of collaboration between government agencies and commercial companies, innovative people and venture capitalists. The story is a fascinating one, and is very well told in this book.
The Internet is more than just a story of technology, it is the culmination of collaboration between government agencies and commercial companies, innovative people and venture capitalists. The story is a fascinating one, and is very well told in this book.
April 21, 2021
the plot points and content itself is interesting.
But I think the split into 10 year chapters was a bad decision.
The jump from the different settings is sometimes jarring, and the development is hard to follow as a consequence of this.
But I think the split into 10 year chapters was a bad decision.
The jump from the different settings is sometimes jarring, and the development is hard to follow as a consequence of this.
October 25, 2017
Great book for all the techies out there.
April 25, 2019
How did an underfunded Dept. of Defense project to try to save computing time become the Internet? This should help answer that question.
June 11, 2022
A must read for anyone that uses technology (everyone).
April 27, 2010
Reading this book brought me back to my childhood, and my very first encounter with "computers" in the 6th grade: a programmable calculator our math teacher brought into class one day. It was the size of a small television set.
I had mixed feelings as I read. The first third of the book is brilliant, recounting how the personal computer and packet-switched networking grew out of Cold War projects by ARPA. The first person accounts from the men who shaped the nascent Internet were fascinating. I was thrilled to learn that, as a contractor to NSA in 1981, I was one of the first 125,000 people in the world to have an email account!
The middle third focuses on the birth of personal computing in the '70s and '80s, and called to mind the many hours I spent with my Commodore 64 and Amiga PC, and of course video games of all description. The final third describes the rise of the Internet in the '90s, a time when I was firmly employed in the IT world. I remember well when my division at SAIC got it's first connection to the Internet, in 1991.
It's a little odd, reading the book from the perspective of 2010. A number of the companies the author focused on as shining examples of Internet success are gone now, or nearly so: AOL, 3Com, Excite, Netscape. Google is not mentioned once, of course, nor are any of the social networking sites that were only barely conceived of when the book was published, in 1998. So it's a sort of Bizarro World description of the Internet, even though we all lived through it.
The early part of the book, in particular, suffers from some whipsawing back and forth along the time line. It's hard to keep a coherent chronology in your mind as you read, to form a big picture of different technologies building and coming together to form the first network.
Likewise, poor editing resulted in some jarring mistakes, at least to a nerd like me. The discussion of why a URL starts with "http//" (should be "http://" is a ghastly mistake for a book about the Internet.
Odd as it sounds, I also got annoyed by so many lengthy direct quotes from personal interviews. People's manner of speaking face-to-face seldom transcribes well and makes them sound kind of dumb when you read the quotes. The interviewees and the author would all have come out sounding smarter, and the book would have been a better read, had the quotes been more paraphrased and the more egregious figures of speech edited out.
I had mixed feelings as I read. The first third of the book is brilliant, recounting how the personal computer and packet-switched networking grew out of Cold War projects by ARPA. The first person accounts from the men who shaped the nascent Internet were fascinating. I was thrilled to learn that, as a contractor to NSA in 1981, I was one of the first 125,000 people in the world to have an email account!
The middle third focuses on the birth of personal computing in the '70s and '80s, and called to mind the many hours I spent with my Commodore 64 and Amiga PC, and of course video games of all description. The final third describes the rise of the Internet in the '90s, a time when I was firmly employed in the IT world. I remember well when my division at SAIC got it's first connection to the Internet, in 1991.
It's a little odd, reading the book from the perspective of 2010. A number of the companies the author focused on as shining examples of Internet success are gone now, or nearly so: AOL, 3Com, Excite, Netscape. Google is not mentioned once, of course, nor are any of the social networking sites that were only barely conceived of when the book was published, in 1998. So it's a sort of Bizarro World description of the Internet, even though we all lived through it.
The early part of the book, in particular, suffers from some whipsawing back and forth along the time line. It's hard to keep a coherent chronology in your mind as you read, to form a big picture of different technologies building and coming together to form the first network.
Likewise, poor editing resulted in some jarring mistakes, at least to a nerd like me. The discussion of why a URL starts with "http//" (should be "http://" is a ghastly mistake for a book about the Internet.
Odd as it sounds, I also got annoyed by so many lengthy direct quotes from personal interviews. People's manner of speaking face-to-face seldom transcribes well and makes them sound kind of dumb when you read the quotes. The interviewees and the author would all have come out sounding smarter, and the book would have been a better read, had the quotes been more paraphrased and the more egregious figures of speech edited out.
March 26, 2010
one of my most cherished books. You could not say that it is brilliantly written but it tells the greatest story about the very foundations of the internet.
It is so interesting how a bunch of pretty much outsiders came up with what may be the greatest invention ever
It is so interesting how a bunch of pretty much outsiders came up with what may be the greatest invention ever
June 4, 2008
*yawn* I had to read this for class... Great if you're out of sleeping pills.
August 15, 2014
A good overview of a lot of people and science leading to the internet.
September 7, 2014
Just what I was looking for. If you're looking for the same thing, this one's for you.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews