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far more than one person could afford. Large universities had them. The
military had them. Computer scientists labored into the night on terminals
connected to them. It was in these eclectic, fluorescent environments that the
ARPANET, the immediate predecessor of the Internet, was born.
Adroitly told by the local wife-husband team of Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon,
Where Wizards Stay Up Late ( Simon & Schuster, $24 hard) is an
insightful and down-to-earth account of the Internet’s modest and remarkable
beginnings. Set in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the Net began as a
government-funded project to connect a disparate handful of computers in
research labs across the country to share resources.
Unlike a typical telephone conversation, in which a steady stream of
information passes on a predictable path almost directly from sender to
receiver, information on the Net is broken down into “packets” which travel
among a vast, interconnected lattice before being recombined at the receiving
end. Upshot: Handling messages becomes trickier, requiring computers to
assemble and disassemble messages from their component packets, but having many
connections from one machine to another means that a failure at one point in
the network doesn’t keep a message from getting through. You simply pick a
different route and send it again. This notion of a “distributed network” is
the technological innovation at the heart of the Internet.
Though first developed in the early 1960s, taking the concept from notebook
sketches to a working system was an uphill battle. AT&T thought the scheme
— in sharp contrast to their heavily centralized telephone network — was too
risky, unworkable, and foolish. Computer giants Control Data and IBM thought it
too expensive. The armed services jostled for ideological control of it.
And so, the necessary conditions for rapid technological growth were set. The
ARPANET designers would have to innovate: They turned to a small consulting
firm to design the packet-switching software, retrofitted off-the-shelf
computers for the hardware, and relied on a small army of graduate students
around the country to deploy and test it.
When they were finished, they had created something miraculous: A working
network that had no central switch, was robust (if not entirely crash-proof),
and which could be monitored from any point on the network, something even
mighty AT&T could not accomplish.
Interesting anecdotes and trivia appear throughout Wizards. Contrary to
popular legend, the Net was not designed as part of a nuclear war survival
scenario. E-mail was not envisioned by its founders, but was an unsanctioned
“hack” that led to the explosive growth of the network. The choice of the
now-ubiquitous “@” symbol is also explained here, as are the origins of many
protocols still used on the Internet today.
Nearly 30 years later, we’re only just beginning to realize the implications
of a worldwide network. The “killer app” at the turn of the millenium isn’t the
Web browser, it’s the entire rebirth of communications — the multitude of ways
we can now interact with other people. No longer just highfalutin’ replacements
for the typewriter and calculator, desktop computers have grown up. They’ve
become the delivery mechanism for feelings, thoughts, ideas, and information
shared among friends and strangers alike around the world. That millions of us
now send e-mail and browse the Web every day, almost as easily as picking up
the phone or watching TV, is a testament to the highway engineers who set out
to design a digital computer network and wound up planting the seeds of a
communications revolution.
Of these founding fathers, few have profited from the experiment, and none
have become household names. And so it perhaps should be, for the Internet was
destined to outgrow any of its components, by design.
Hafner (a Newsweek technology editor and coauthor of Cyberpunk)
and Lyon have done a remarkable job sorting through the many players involved
to present a story that is illuminating, even inspiring. Despite an inevitable
abundance of acronyms in the text, anyone curious about the history of the Net
will find a lot to learn and much to enjoy in this book.
— Laxman Gani
For me, the prototypical audio book is a Robert James Waller selection, bought by Aunt Molly, to pass
the time during drives to Dallas or Houston in her Volvo. This scenario doesn’t
work with a Henry Rollins selection, though, particularly this one, for
somewhere around Waco or Columbus you’d be overcome with the urge, in an
adolescent fury fueled by his relentless ranting, to kill yourself kamikaze
style by plowing into another car — preferably another Volvo. Or a cop.
For most of the two-hour offering in Everything (2-13-61/Thirsty Ear
Records), a single chapter (!) from his book Eye Scream, Henry Rollins
lives up to his unofficial nickname, “I’m Angry.” Rollins hates: random
violence, heroin users, Crips, Bloods, certain women (or, at certain points,
all women), the government, and especially cops, and he’s not shy about
expressing it. While he makes the occasional witty observation, most of the
two-cassette release is a cyclical torrent built around the word “everything,”
which doubles here as both an uber-structure housing the evils of the world and
the glimmering promise of something better.
The jazzy punctuations from musicians Rashied Ali and Charles Gayle appear in
odd places, sometimes augmenting sections in a thematically appropriate way,
but often just skronking for the sake of skronking. Yet Ali and Gayle are the
most artistic beings on the tape, for Rollins, despite the self-made reputation
as an important spoken word artist, isn’t doing anything here that any
semi-articulate, embittered guy couldn’t do after putting away a couple of
beers. His pot-shots are either so obvious or so overblown that there’s no
compelling reason to get to the 40-minute second tape, although that by itself
would be an almost bearable distillation of the Rollins rant. The problem
lies in listening to the 80-minute first tape first, which moves with the
single-mindedness and sophistication of a steamroller on a patch of fresh
asphalt. By the time the second tape rolls around, He’s Mad as Hell and He’s
Not Gonna Take It Anymore. And unless you’re a serious Rollins devotee, you
won’t want to take it anymore, either.
— Phil West
This article appears in December 20 • 1996 and December 20 • 1996 (Cover).