A History of the Internet and the Digital Future
Distributed for Reaktion Books
- Contents
- Review Quotes

Phase I: Distributed Network, Centrifugal Ideas
1 A Concept Born in the Shadow of the Nuke
2 The Military Experiment
3 The Essence of the Internet
4 Computers Become Cheap, Fast and Common
Phase II: Expansion
5 The Hoi Polloi Connect
6 Communities Based on Interest, not Proximity
7 From Military Networks to the Global Internet
8 The Web!
9 A Platform for Trade and the Pitfalls of the Dot-com
Phase III: The Emerging Environment
10 Web 2.0 and the Return to the Oral Tradition
11 New Audiences, the Fourth Wall and Extruded Media
12 Two-way Politics
13 Promise and Peril
Glossary
References
Select Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
“The WikiLeaks saga may have drawn us into new, and scary, galaxies of cyberspace, but this survey of the online story so far offers a handy catch-up that will prove a boon to geeks and dabblers alike.”
“An engrossing, well-written account of the Internet’s founding and the backstory of the underlying protocols and plumbing, which draws on that rich history to make predictions about the net’s future.”
History: History of Technology
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