Summary of Where Wizards Stay Up Late
Where Wizards Stay Up Late is written by Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon which focus on the origin and development of the internet. The book came out from a celebration of the 25th anniversary of the discovery of the internet, and narrates a story of a small group of engineers and scientific researchers who put down the foundation for the most influential and the most extensive communication breakthrough ever since the telephone was invented.
The book talks about what brought about the internet as well as the Advanced Research Projects Agency, who offered all of the innovative funding for the net. The authors discuss and bring out the picture of the personalities involved and explain the technical obstacles which had to be overcome. Most of those men involved in the discovery of the internet put in long hours hence proving true the second part of the title of the book.
The book explains the physical development of the internet and compares that account with a discussion of what caused the use of internet to grow rapidly counting the use of email and the endorsement of the internet’s practical applications. The authors talk about how various people had to collaborate, share out memorandums, and hash out matters in order to get to know how the internet was going to function. This attempt closes by summarizing the popularization of the internet in the 1980s.
I chose this book since it gave me the background for understanding the difficult task behind internet and underlying principle for shared out networks. I was motivated by the cooperation, enthusiasm and the work ethic shown by those entailed, mostly because their strong focus often fell in the face of many critics who failed to realize the possibilities and value of a distributed network. I find the whole book intriguing and very satisfying.
Works Cited
Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon. Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996. Print.
