A Brief History of the Future: From Radio Days to Internet Years in a Lifetime [Anglais] [Relié]

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

One of the better meditations on technology and the Internet to burble up from the digerati in recent years, this fact-filled volume offers a selective history of computing as it traces the dawn of the World Wide Web and honors the engineers who created it. Naughton, a Cambridge fellow and a columnist for the Observer (U.K.), plunges into the nuances of packet-switching and compression algorithms as he indulges his obsession with communication, first evidenced by an intense interest in short-wave radio during his childhood in rural Ireland. Conveying detailed aspects of programming with relative ease, Naughton surveys the heroes of the Internet and reviews their achievements. We meet J.C.R. Licklider, the MIT-trained engineer who first pondered the tantalizing potential of "man-computer symbiosis," and the great Paul Baran, a talented young engineer at the RAND think tank who in 1959 developed the first distributed digital network for the U.S. military (which was stoutly resisted, Naughton points out, by top brass at the analogue-based AT&T). The heaviest hitter, however, is probably Tim Berners-Lee, who got interested in the idea of hyperlinks as a way of aiding his terrible memory and went on to develop the first Web browser and the now-ubiquitous HTML language for the Web. With amusing asidesAthe first e-mail message may have been sent by an engineer in L.A. asking his colleagues to retrieve a razor he left at a conference in the U.K.Athis is a particularly thoughtful and readable history of the Web to date. (July)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Adult/High School-The title will draw readers right in, and Naughton's anecdotal writing style and breadth of information will hold them. The author starts with his own childhood and the appearance of the new technology in his home. He recalls the bedroom he shared with a sibling and a lone radio. That bedroom and radio have evolved into the modern study complete with an Internet-capable computer. He tells wonderful stories about the computers of the `50s and `60s and the people who invented them and reinvented them, making them subsequently more and more powerful, smaller and smaller. Toward the middle of the book he gets bogged down with details concerning the Internet creators. He gives maybe a bit more extraneous information about the people themselves than computer techies would welcome, but it is entertaining for those who are always looking for the "warm fuzzy" side of the computer experience. Naughton does not set himself up as an expert, which probably accounts for a few technical errors. They don't detract from a very satisfying, richly informative read.

Cynthia J. Rieben, W. T. Woodson High School, Fairfax, VA

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Journalist and academic Naughton (a fellow of Wolfson Coll., Cambridge) has written a compelling and thoroughly readable history of the information revolution. Because he includes the personal stories behind the growth and development of communications technology over the past 50 years, his book is not, unlike other titles on the Internet, a dry, bare-bones history of science but rather an often humorous and ironic saga of technological advances from the clumsy, massive computers of the 1940s to today's high-tech, high-speed machines. Dedicated to Vannevar Bush and Tim Berners-Lee, whose work was essential to the underpinnings of what would become the Internet, Naughton's history reads like a drama, detailing the major players in the battles of the 1990s involving Bill Gates, Netscape, and Linus Torvalds, among others. This is a book for anyone who wants a clear picture of the growth of the net and an understanding of what led to its ubiquity. An excellent complement to Berners-Lee's own Weaving the Web (LJ 10/1/99) and Joshua Quittner and Michelle Slatalla's Speeding the Net (LJ 6/15/98), it is highly recommended for public and academic libraries.
Dayne Sherman, Southeastern Louisiana Univ. , Hammond
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A damnable thing about the Internet is its extraneous spam and double-click.com ads. An admirable thing about a well-written book is its distillation of the essence of its subject without any hypertext distractions. That's what Naughton does in this readable narrative of the beginnings of the Internet. For all the kudos heaped on Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, or on Vint Cerf, inventor of TCP/IP codes for electronic mail, Naughton underscores that the Internet's lineage reaches back to the 1930s and 1940s, when Vannevar Bush, then the czar of American science, cogitated about linking computers. Naughton smoothly segues the story to the 1960s, when computer networking became a vital concern to the Pentagon, whose Advanced Research Projects Agency financed the development of the first networks. The author clearly explains how various software engineers appraised problems in networking and designed solutions, such as breaking messages into packets for faster transmission; and he salts the technotalk with interesting anecdotes, as about the ubiquitous Rybczynski, Witold. One Good Turn: A Natural History of the Screwdriver and the Screw. Sept_. 2000. 176p. illus. Scribner, $22 (0-684-86729-X).When prompted by a newspaper's request for an essay on the millennium's best tool, Rybczynski's thoughts alighted on the screwdriver. This charming book chronicles his first step in researching the essay, a hunt for the ur-reference or illustration of the prosaic device, which takes him back to incunabula. A justly lauded author of architectural topics (lately, as biographer of Frederick Law Olmsted, A Clearing in the Distance, 1999), Rybczynski filigrees his bibliographic discoveries with humanizing sketches of the inventors who dealt with the difficult physical requirements of fashioning a screw, which, in the pre-precision-tool era, made it a more expensive attaching device than nails. Rybczynski conjectured that examples might be found in early modern weaponry, a hunch vindicated on his trip to an arms museum displaying arquebuses and jousting armor. And one knows that Archimedes' screw has to make an appearance; when it does, it caps a finely wrought excursion into a wonderful story that--who would have guessed it--reposed in the tool box. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

An intimate, gloriously written look at the communications revolution and how it has opened up the world.

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.

". . . a fascinating and highly accessible history of the Internet packed with intriguing anecdotes and stimulating insights." --David Puttnam

"At last the Internet gets the history book it deserves." --The Bookseller

A history of the creation of the Internet and other technologies widely used today but rarely understood. Profiles the scientists and engineers who created these technologies, telling how they were created, and why, explaining the values and ideas which drove scientists to create them. DLC: Telecommunications--History--20th century.

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.