So many separate strands of invention, selfless motivation and vision combined over time to create what we now know as the Internet that it is exceedingly difficult to select a birth moment, much less a single "father" (sadly, the gestation seems motherless, though several men now compete - some embarrassingly actively - for the title of alpha father).
Credit sometimes goes as far back as Charles Babbage, the half-batty Victorian genius who invented, but never built, the "Difference Engine", a proto-computer. Others suggest pre-Net American visionary Vannevar Bush, who in 1945 published an astonishing essay called "As We May Think" about a PC-like machine with Web-like capabilities, called the Memex.
I'd elect Robert Taylor, appointed in 1965 to head the Pentagon's Information Processing Techniques Office. Taylor had three different teletype-style terminals in his Washington, DC office, each linked to a computer at the three research centres affiliated with his office: one at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and two in California. How much more efficient it would be, he thought, if he could network and communicate with those three machines from one access point. He explained his idea to a higher-up who, he said, "liked (the idea) right away. And after about 20 minutes he took a million dollars out of someone else's budget . . . and put it in my budget and said, `Great. Get started.' " Thus was born the ARPANET, the Internet's forerunner.
This piece of Internet lore and others that equally capture the quirky, fly-by-night, unlikely, and often humorous tale of its creation are related in this new book on the history of the Internet by Irish-born and British-based academic and journalist John Naughton. Naughton, who oddly combined a computer science teaching position with the role of the Observer's television critic, now writes a weekly column on the Internet for the paper. That shows in this history, which sometimes has the feel of a set of engaging columns loosely linked.
Some sections are riveting, such as Naughton's description of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's invention of TCP/IP, the basic language of the Internet that allows computers to find and talk to each other. He is captivating on the creation of FidoNet, an early (and still running) alternative public Internet. And he can be lyrical about the wonderfully odd intelligence of the best computer programmers.
BUT as a whole, the book reads unevenly, as if rushed to print, and sometimes contradicts itself or gets details wrong. For example, it never seems to know if it is claiming that the Net was created primarily as a military communication network that could survive nuclear war (Taylor, who should know, has said emphatically that it wasn't). Sometimes an editorial eye is lacking - Naughton consistently writes Maunchley for Mauchly, the surname of the well-known computing pioneer who co-created the first operational computer, the ENIAC.
And the book seems unsure of its intended audience and purpose. Naughton says existing Net histories are sketchy on the Web, yet post-1991 he really touches only on Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee and the Netscape/ Microsoft rivalry. He painstakingly - and annoyingly - explains every detail of what is onscreen as his computer logs on to the Web, a sequence of interest (perhaps) only to absolute beginners, yet throws around unexplained terms like directory, hotlink, node, DOS-box, and command interpreter.
And most of his Internet history merely rehashes - sometimes in close paraphrase - a tale already told superbly in Kate Hafner and Matthew Lyon's 1996 history of the Net, Where Wizards Stay Up Late. Their book is riveting primarily because the authors went to the source - the figures, nearly all still alive and kicking, who created the Net and Web. Oddly, Naughton relies on a limited set of written sources, giving an oddly distanced, flat tone (and far too many footnotes) in a work describing such an exciting, still-living slice of computing history. And surely part of the thrill of writing such a book would be having a great excuse for contacting all those Internet forefathers?
A Brief History is a pleasant and entertaining read, but it's a shame Naughton didn't instead tackle the book he seems to suggest most needs writing - a detailed and driving history of that nebulous, fantastical virtual place, the World Wide Web.
Karlin Lillington writes about technology for The Irish Times, The Guardian, Wired News and other publications
