Book details of 'Inventing the Internet (Inside Technology)'

Title	Inventing the Internet (Inside Technology)
Author(s)	Janet Abbate
ISBN	0262011727
Language	English
Published	June 1999
Publisher	MIT Press

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Reviewer amazon.com wrote:
History is written by winners, but Bill Gates isn't talking yet. Those interested in how this weird, wonderful World Wide Web--and its infrastructure--came to be should turn to historian Janet Abbate's look at 40 years of innovation in Inventing the Internet. Peeking behind the curtain to show the personalities and larger forces guiding the development of the Net, from its dawn as a robust military communications network designed to survive multiple attacks to today's commercial Web explosion, Abbate succeeds in demystifying this all-pervasive technology and its creators. Abbate's survey covers everything from David Baran's work with the RAND corporation to the development of packet-switching theory to CERN's Tim Berners-Lee and his hypertext networking system. She also factors in the influences that caused the Net to evolve such as the Cold War, changing research priorities, and the hacker subculture that pushed existing technologies into new forms, each more and more like today's fast, global communications system. The research is impeccable, the writing is lively, and the analysis is insightful. (See especially the discussion of the "surprise hit" of ARPANET, a minor function known as e-mail.) Abbate clearly knows her subject and her audience, and Inventing the Internet encapsulates a milestone of modern history.
Reviewer Rob Slade wrote:
Buried midway through the introduction comes the statement that the author has chosen to focus on a select group of topics in order to support her own view of the most important social and cultural factors of the Internet. The intent of the book, therefore, is complex. The text must examine a technical development, identify social hypotheses, and present arguments from the historical record to buttress those theories. Chapter one starts out by asserting that the most celebrated of the ARPANET's technical innovations was packet switching. Certainly packet switching is a core concept in all discussions of modern data communications. Unfortunately, Abbate does not display the merits of the idea with sufficient clarity, never dealing with issues of traffic differences between voice and data, only tangentially mentioning circuit switching, and clouding the deliberation with factors more properly related to routing. There is also an evident lack of familiarity with basic technical processes. In addition, the author states that the ARPANET was the proving ground for packet switching, ignoring the contribution of demonstrably much more widely used networks such as Datapac and Transpac. Furthermore, looking back to the introduction we find that the social aspect we, as readers, are supposed to note is how technologies are socially constructed. Other than the fact that technical people talk to each other, nothing significant seems to be presented along this line. Finally, the extensive citations of works in the bibliography appeared to support the scholarship of the work, until I noted that the most interesting points tended to be those referring to private interviews and materials written relatively long after the fact. The content of chapter two alternates between descriptions of political and managerial machinations of those involved in the early development of the ARPANET and mentions of layered protocol modeling. Early users and usages are discussed in chapter three, but the text swings between acknowledging and denying user development. Internetworking is introduced in chapter four, but protocol layering is not re-examined even though it is at this point that the concept becomes important. Chapter five starts with a generic debate about the need for, and interests against, standards, but then spends most of the time reviewing X.25 and the OSI (Open Systems Interconnection) model, with little relevance to the Internet. Having meandered through about ten years in the first five chapters, chapter six leapfrogs twenty, racing from the military ARPANET into the academic Internet and finally into the present commercial Internet. The trailblazing work of BITNET, Usenet, and even Fidonet is given only token mention, and the description of the World Wide Web seems to completely misunderstand how hypertext contributed to the use and popularity of the net, stressing colour images rather than integration of function. Despite the collation of a wide variety of source materials, and the presentation of a number of events not commonly cited, this book fails as both history and social commentary. Too many major occurrences are dismissed too quickly to confer a full understanding of the development of the Internet. The cultural points Abbate tries to make are either too subtle to come across to this uncultivated geek or are unremarkable and trite. (The closing statement that the net's strengths lie in adaptability and participatory design is surely not news to anyone with the slightest knowledge of Internet history.) Mostly, though, it appears that Abbate's lack of comprehension of the technical aspects of the net ensures a failure to understand significant historical and social factors as well. copyright Robert M. Slade, 1999
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Book description:

"This sophisticated history is the best account so far published of the unpredictable and turbulent evolution of the Internet. With its broad international context, the book will be of value to makers and users of the global communications network, as well as to science and technology policy makers." -- Martin Campbell-Kelly, Reader in Computer Science, University of Warwick, UK Since the late 1960s the Internet has grown from a single experimental network serving a dozen sites in the United States to a network of networks linking millions of computers worldwide. In Inventing the Internet, Janet Abbate recounts the key players and technologies that allowed the Internet to develop; but her main focus is always on the social and cultural factors that influenced the Internets design and use. The story she unfolds is an often twisting tale of collaboration and conflict among a remarkable variety of players, including government and military agencies, computer scientists in academia and industry, graduate students, telecommunications companies, standards organizations, and network users. The story starts with the early networking breakthroughs formulated in Cold War think tanks and realized in the Defense Department's creation of the ARPANET. It ends with the emergence of the Internet and its rapid and seemingly chaotic growth. Abbate looks at how academic and military influences and attitudes shaped both networks; how the usual lines between producer and user of a technology were crossed with interesting and unique results; and how later users invented their own very successful applications, such as electronic mail and the World Wide Web. She concludes that such applications continue the trend of decentralized, user-driven development that has characterized the Internet's entire history and that the key to the Internet's success has been a commitment to flexibility and diversity, both in technical design and in organizational culture.