Book review: Inventing the internet, by Janet Abbate

✍ Scribed by Malone, Cheryl Knott

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 29 KB
• Volume: 51
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0002-8231
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-4571(2000)51:8<787::aid-asi100>3.0.co;2-f

✦ Synopsis

Projects Agency (ARPA) and its support for computing research, she takes a broader view of the context relevant to the development of internetworking. Consequently, Abbate provides a detailed account in which the military is only part of a complex story of four decades of developments in the U.S. and elsewhere. And despite the fact that many of the people responsible for the innovations she chronicles are still living, Abbate refrains from characterizing them as "wizards," as two journalists have done in their popular version of the origins of the Internet (Hafner & Lyon, 1996), instead maintaining the balanced tone expected in a scholarly monograph. Abbate, who teaches in the History Department at the