'Nerds 2.0.1' is the first detailed history of computer networking, telling the dramatic story of how we have come to be wired together by the Internet and the World Wide Web.
The narrative begins with the launch of the Soviet Sputnik satellite and the efforts of one Pentagon bureaucrat, Bob Taylor, to save money. By building a network of computers, he believed the government could avoid buying so many new ones for academic research. From these modest Cold War beginnings in the 1960s a global networking industry has flourished, creating virtual communities, online shopping, ubiquitous e-mail and immense fortunes.
Stephen Segaller's timely book draws on detailed interviews with more than seventy of the pioneers who have used their technological genius and business skills to make incompatible systems work together, to make networking user-friendly, and to create a new global communications medium that rivals the telephone system or television in its scope and reach.
The "overnight sensation" of the Internet really has taken almost thirty years to arrive. This book brings us the often comical history of networking technology and the personal stories of those who made it all happen - from the pentagon to the first academic network; from the researcher who "lived in the future" at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre to the hackers who jumpstarted the personal computer industry at the Homebrew Computer Club; from the entrepreneur who made a fortune with the motto "Steal My Software" to the hippies who created a virtual community for Grateful deadheads; from the university campus basement that spawned the Mosaic Web-browser to the European nuclear research lab where the World Wide Web was invented; and from the late start of the sleeping giant, Microsoft, belatedly recognising the Internet tidal wave, to the burrito-eating twentysomething founders of the hugely successful new Web media company Excite.
'Nerds 2.0.1' is a book that will entertain, surprise, and inform every reader, whether wired or unwired.
