Where Wizards Stay up Late

"If you want to go all the way back, Janet Abbate’s Inventing The Internet really takes it all the way back to the Eisenhower administration and the very beginnings of electronic computers. It all gets pretty dark. But I would characterise the difference more as Abbate being more technically fluent and Hafner more interested in the human story of the personalities that gave rise to the Internet. Abbate really pursues it all the way back, and Hafner picks it up more in the 60s. Both of them emphasise what a mixed bag the Internet was; this bizarre collaboration between the military, academia and telecommunication industries produced something that we perceive as a natural resource almost, but which, in fact, was cobbled together in a very happenstance way, and there are a lot of accidents that contributed to the way it’s set up right now."