Where Wizards Stay Up Late
Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon · 1996
The standard narrative of how the ARPANET was built, from the first idea to the network that became the internet.
The subtitle is The Origins of the Internet. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon, both journalists, interviewed many of the people who built the ARPANET, the experimental network that is the ancestor of the internet, and wrote a clear, character-driven history of it.
What it’s about
The story begins in the 1960s with the problem of connecting very different computers, and with the then-radical idea of breaking messages into packets. It follows the government researchers who funded the project, the engineers at the company Bolt Beranek and Newman who built the first network processors, and the graduate students at the first sites who made it all work.
It includes the famous first transmission in 1969, from UCLA to the Stanford Research Institute, which got through only the first two letters of “login” before the system crashed. It then moves through the invention of email, the growth of the network, and the development of the protocols, including the work of Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn on TCP/IP, that let separate networks join into an internet.
Why it belongs on coldboot
Nothing in the web and browser stories of the 1990s makes sense without the network underneath them. This book covers the part that came before, and it shows how often the key decisions were small, practical, and made by people working under deadlines.
Keep in mind
It is centered on the ARPANET and its American builders, so other early networks and non-US contributions get less attention than they deserve. It was written in the mid-1990s, before the web had reshaped everything it describes.
Edition linked: Simon & Schuster paperback (1998).