On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders

Discover the fascinating story of the early days of the Internet and the parallel developments in the alternate world of computer bulletin board systems. In On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders, an absorbing chronicle of the inventive, individualistic, and often cantankerous individuals who set the Internet free, Michael A. Banks describes how the online population created a new culture and turned a new frontier into their vision of the future. This is not the story of DARPAnet, CERN, Tim Berners-Lee, Vinton Cerf, and other familiar names whose tales have been recorded elsewhere. Nor is it preoccupied with serial ports, phase-shift keying, or similar techno-topics. This is a story of the building of the Internet: the characters and the events that made it what it became, and the successes, mistakes, lucky guesses, and near misses that changed the culture.