Network Geeks: How They Built the Internet [Paperback]

The impact on modern society made by the Internet is immeasurable. Yet some questioned why anyone would want such a thing when the idea was first introduced.

Part history, part memoir and part cultural study, Network Geeks charts the creation of the Internet and the establishment of the Internet Engineering Task Force, from the viewpoint of a self-proclaimed geek who witnessed these developments first-hand. With boundless enthusiasm and abundant humour, Brian Carpenter leads the reader on a journey from post-war Britain to post-millennium New Zealand, describing how the Internet grew into todays ubiquitous, global network, including the genesis of the World-Wide Web in the hotbeds of a particle collider at CERN. Illuminating the science and technology behind the apparent magic trick of the Internet, Network Geeks opens a window into the initially bewildering world of the Internet engineering geek. After reading this book, you may wish to join this world yourself.

Hey Folks!.- Before My Time.- Where Do Geeks Come From?.- Going Up.- In Control.- Two Ivory Towers.- Diversity.- Economy Class.- Parallel Universes.- The Years of Miraculous Growth.- Going Under.

This is a geek page-turner! I learned much about the European side of the Internet's history that I did not know in detail and a lot about Brian himself, too. I don't know how he remembered so much in detail!

Vint Cerf

Internet Pioneer

Dr. Brian Carpenter is a physicist, computer scientist, and engineer born in Leicester, England just after World War II and educated at the Universities of Cambridge and Manchester. As leader of the networking group at the CERN particle physics laboratory near Geneva, he was in at the birth of the European Internet in the late 1980s, and the World-Wide Web was invented elsewhere in the same buildinl£+