A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime - Hardcover

Naughton, John

3.79

237 ratings by Goodreads

9781585670321: A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1585670324 ISBN 13: 9781585670321

Publisher: Overlook Books, 2000

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

The Internet is the most remarkable thing human beings have built since the pyramids. A millennium from now, historians will look back at it and marvel that a people equipped with such clumsy tools succeeded in creating such a leviathan.

Yet even as the Net pervades our lives, we begin to take it for granted. We have lost our capacity for wonder. Most of us have no idea where the Internet came from, how it works, or who created it and why. And even fewer have any idea of what it means for society and the future.

John Naughton has written a warm and passionate book that seeks to rescue the Internet from the condescension of posterity, to celebrate the engineers and scientists who implemented their dreams in hardware and software, and to explain the values and ideas that drove them. Although its subject seems technical, the book in fact is personal. John Naughton writes about the Net like Nick Hornby writes about soccer. A Brief History of the Future is an intimate celebration of vision and altruism, ingenuity and determination, and above all the power of ideas to change the world.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

Review:

John Naughton, to judge by this learned but lightly written history of modern communications technology, is deeply interested in just about everything. It mystifies the Irish-born Cambridge University scholar that so few people share his fascination with the Internet--and, he grumps, "the higher you go up the social and political hierarchy the worse it gets."

A Brief History of the Future, whose title is just right, is Naughton's attempt to educate the uninitiated in how the Internet came to be. Although its development occurred in starts and stops over a half-century, the Internet came into its own only in the 1990s, with the arrival of the World Wide Web and widely available software to negotiate it. Each of those innovations, though, drew on work that sometimes extends deep into the past, and Naughton does a good job of tracing technical lineages. Though studded with geekspeak, his narrative doesn't presuppose much background knowledge on his readers' part, unlike Stephen Segaller's worthy Nerds 2.0.1., which covers some of the same ground. Naughton's cast of characters includes such scientific and administrative luminaries as Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, Paul Baran, Bill Gates, Linus Torvalds, and Tim Berners-Lee (but, sad to say, not Al Gore), each of whom made contributions large and small to what Naughton insists is a technological revolution with endless possibilities for the common good.

Well-written and richly detailed, Naughton's book is a fine introduction to the Net, and to the countless, largely unsung innovators who made it possible. --Gregory McNamee

About the Author:

John Naughton has been an academic and a journalist all his working life. He is a Senior Lecturer in Systems at the Open University and, since 1987, has written a weekly column for the Observer, which has won him several major awards. He is also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge, and the Director of the College's Press Fellowship Program.

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.