Where Wizards Stay Up Late is an intriguing account of the men (not a woman to be found), institutions and processes involved in the development of the concepts, designs, and applications that led directly to the Internet we know today. It will be of interest to anyone who is aware that the origins of the R and D work behind the Internet lay deep in the Pentagon, and who has wondered what significance to attach to this. The book introduces us to key players, and tells us enough about them and their work to make us rethink any easy assumptions we may have made about the world of technological innovation and the folk who populate it problematic.
The story begins from an opportunistic move in 1994 by a once successful computer company to improve its ailing fortunes by cashing in on the 25th anniversary of the project to produce a successful nationwide system of networked computers. It hosted a weekend reunion of the surviving participants from that project. Dozens came, others didn't. Some came to stake their claims to a place in history. Others were less self promoting.
With the scene set at a cracking pace in the opening pages, the story immediately leaps back almost 40 years to Sputnik, Eisenhower, and part of the Defense Department's research response to the US having been scooped in the satellite stakes. The tale proceeds with the kind of crispness one would expect from Newsweek's technology correspondent and an acquisitions editor-turned author cowriter.
This is an account written firmly in the tradition of history as the work of key individuals. Whatever support workers assisted the main players remain invisible. But for all that, we get a good sense of what the informants saw as the forces driving them along, what they saw the issues as being, and how they responded to challenges. We also get enough detail about technical aspects of the work to come away with a working sense of what made the initial network tick.
The real contribution of the book lies in its attempt to make 'technology' three dimensional. It is impossible to see the Internet as just a technology, a communications device after reading this book. We get a sense of some of the values, some of the beliefs, some of the aspirations, some of the fears that went into the drive to develop a viable network. This is a book to give to folk who hold to the myth that tools are neutral. It will be a great resource for anyone interested in the philosophy or sociology of technology - particularly for anyone interested in developing critical perspectives on technology. There are themes and issues, information and information gaps, that beg critical engagement.
And it's a fun read into the bargain, a fitting follow up to Hafner's earlier book , Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier. It's well worth a look.
Eisenhower hadn't wanted a seasoned military expert heading the Pentagon. The president distrusted the military-industrial complex and the fiefdoms of the armed services. his attitude toward them sometimes bordered on contempt. (p. 15)
With the exception of a few supporters at Bell Laboratories who understood digital technology, AT & T continued to resist the idea [of slicing data into message blocks and sending them to find their way through a matrix of phone lines]. The most outspoken skeptics were some of AT & T's most senior technical people. "After I heard the refrain 'bullshit' often enough", Baran recalled, "I was motivated to go away and write a series of memoranda papers to show, for example, that algorithms were possible that allowed a short message to contain all the information it needed to find its way through the network". With each objection answered another was raised and another piece of a report had to be written. By the time Baran had answered all the concerns raised by the defense, communications, and compute science communities, nearly four years had passed and his volumes numbered eleven. (p. 63)
Ornstein was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam war. By 1969 a lot of people who had never questioned their own involvement in Pentagon-sponsored research projects began having second thoughts. Ornstein had taken to wearing a lapel pin that said RESIST. The pin also bore the [Omega] sign, for electrical resistance, a popular anti war symbol for electrical engineers. One day, before a Pentagon briefing, Ornstein conceived a new use for his pin. In meetings at the Pentagon, it wasn't unusual for the men around the table to remove their jackets and roll up their shirt sleeves. Ornstein told Heart [a colleague] that he was going to pin his RESIST button onto a General's jacket when no one was looking ... Ornstein didn't, but he did wear his pin to the meeting. (p. 113)
The engineers at BBN relished opportunities to spook the telephone company repair people with their ability to detect, and eventually predict, line trouble from afar. By examining the data, BBN could sometimes predict that a line was about to go down. The phone company's repair offices had never heard of such a thing and didn't take to it well. When BBN loopback tests determined there was trouble on a line, say, between Menlo Park (Stanford) and Santa Barbara, one of Heart's engineers in Cambridge picked up the phone and called Pacific Bell. "You're having trouble with your line between Menlo Park and Santa Barbara", he'd say. "Are you calling from Menlo Park or Santa Barbara?", the Pacific Bell technician would ask. "I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts". "Yeah, right". Eventually, when BBN's calls proved absolutely correct, the telephone company began to send repair teams out to find whatever trouble BBN had spotted. (p. 163)
Tomlinson became well known for SNDMSG and CPYNET. But he became better known for a brilliant (he called it obvious) decision he made while writing ... programs. He needed a way to separate, in the e-mail address, the name of the user from the machine the user was on. How should that be denoted? He wanted a character that would not, under any circumstances, be found in the user's name. He looked down at the keyboard he was using, a Model 33 Teletype, which almost everyone else on the Net used, too. In addition to the letters and numerals there were about a dozen punctuation marks. "I got there first, so I got to choose any punctuation I wanted," Tomlinson said. "I chose the @ sign." He had no idea he was creating an icon for the wired world. (p. 192)
A frequent flier, Lucasi seldom boarded a plane without lugging his thirty-pound "portable" Texas Instruments terminal with an acoustic coupler, so he could dial in and check his messages from the road. "I really used it to manage ARPA," Lucasik recalled. "I would be at a meeting, and every hour I would dial up my mail. I encouraged everybody in sight to use it." He pushed it on all his office directors and they pushed it on others. ARPA managers noticed that e-mail was the easiest way to communicate with the boss, and the fastest way to get his quick approval on things. (p. 193)
By the end of 1973, Cerf and Kahn had completed their paper, "A Protocol for Packet Network Intercommunication." They flipped a coin to determine whose name should appear first, and Cerf won the toss. The paper appeared in a widely read engineering journal the following spring. (p. 226)
Taylor arrived late [to the BBN anniversary party], but not too late to engage in something of a dust up with Bob Kahn, who warned the AP reporter to be certain to distinguish between the early days of the ARPANET and the Internet, and that it was the invention of TCP/IP that marked the true beginnings of internetworking. Not true, said Taylor. The Internet's roots most certainly lay with the ARPANET. The group around the telephone grew uncomfortable. "How about women?" asked the reporter, perhaps to break the silence. "Are there any female pioneers?" More silence. (p. 263)
A must visit site: The companion web site to Where Wizards Stay Up Late
This site grew from an embarrassment of riches. In the course of researching the book, we found ourselves in possession of dozens of diagrams, hand-drawn sketches and maps, photographs and technical papers--the original work of the earliest network pioneers. But we were able to put just a fraction of it all into the book. And while the book may be the perfect medium for telling a good story, the Web is the perfect venue for much of the primary source material behind it......
Read Ann Online's interview with Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon about Where Wizards Stay up Late and their writing lives in general. Read Amazon.com's interview with Katie Hafner. back to reviews/back to book index/back to main index