
Where Wizards Stay up Late: The Origins of the Internet (1996) - tosh
https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=547625
======
drallison
I lived the book. :-) (Full disclosure: Katie Hafner is a good friend.) Katie
is an engaging and skilled observer of the social aspects of our complex
society and the people that populate it. Other books of hers that you might
like:

 _Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier_ ;

 _The Well: A Story of Love, Death & Real Life in the Seminal Online
Community_;

 _A Romance on Three Legs: Glenn Gould 's Obsessive Quest for the Perfect
Piano_;

 _Mother Daughter Me: A Memoir_.

------
Rerarom
What I found curious about all histories of the Internet is a scarcity of
information on when the name 'Internet' originated. Most narratives just talk
about various networks and then suddenly start using the name Internet with no
introduction. Others point to its appearance in the name of TCP/IP but not
explain its use to denote the network as a whole. Others say that the Internet
came into being when arpanet and nsfnet merged, but that feels to much like a
post hoc story to me.

Does anyone know when the one single network came to be called Internet and
why?

~~~
godelmachine
Didn’t Marvin Minsky name it as the “Intergalactic Network”?

~~~
ssivark
Not Minsky, but JCR Licklider!

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intergalactic_Computer_Network)

------
katiecharm
I wish teens today could experience the glory of the Internet in the 90s. It
was an anarchist’s wasteland of data and possibility, and the idea of there
even being consequences for anything you might do online seemed absurd.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Looking back it's clear to me that 9/11 changed everything in North American
culture.

~~~
harshreality
Was it all 9/11, or was it the tech bubble popping as well? I don't know how
to disentangle those two things, culturally.

~~~
cmrdporcupine
Many things happened all in a couple years then -- Bush election, .com bubble
pop, 9/11, the Seattle WTO protests, the turn of the milennium.

To me it was kind of like the closing of a somewhat utopian-perspective era
that started in the mid-90s.

------
dang
This looks like just a catalog page. It's a good book, but a catalog page
isn't substantive enough to make for a good HN submission.

------
nzt48
This book has been on my reading list for a while and I started it today. I'm
only a couple of chapters in. Reading about how it was necessary to convince
the military to accept their projects is really cool. Are there any similar
books/articles covering the adoption of quantum computing?

------
notnewb
anyone read this recently? thoughts?

~~~
EamonnMR
It's a good account of ARPANET through early TCP/IP. Also focuses on BBN for a
good chunk which is cool because the name does not come up a lot. Definitely
would recommend if you haven't read it before.

~~~
ghaff
>Also focuses on BBN for a good chunk which is cool because the name does not
come up a lot.

That makes me feel a bit old given that I knew a lot of people at BBN when I
was in school although I didn't really know much about the proto-internet at
the time :-)

But you're right. BBN's role has sort of faded into history.

