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

by Michael A. Banks

On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders is 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 book will introduce you to the innovators who laid the foundation for the Internet and the World Wide Web, the man who invented online chat, and the people who invented the products all of us use online every day. Learn where, when, how and why the Internet came into being, and exactly what hundreds of thousands of people were doing online before the Web. See who was behind it all, and what inspired them.

Genres: History, Technology

247 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Michael A. Banks is the author of 43 books, the most recent of which is Blogging Heroes: Interviews with 30 of the World's Top Bloggers. He also wrote the New York Times bestseller CROSLEY: Two Brothers and a Business Empire that Transformed the Nation, The eBay Survival Guide, and several science fiction novels, as well as a number of other non-fiction books.

Also credited as Michael Banks.

Reviews

[Todd Stockslager · Rating 2 out of 5]

Perhaps this is the "secret history of the internet" because the true history of the internet remains mostly a secret to the reader after finishing this book!

Banks spends a few pages sketching in a bare outline of the early technical roots of the internet in the ARPA/DARPA days, and does an OK job of tracking the history of bulletin boards and the early online giants CompuServe and AOL. But the threads start and remain unconnected in the history, so that my one-sentence summary of the book would read like this:

"Some university guys in the 50s started networking military computers, then Compuserve and AOL figured out how to get people dialup, then the internet came."

Interestingly, in a timeline in an appendix Banks does mention in very short list form some of the key integration points between the technology, business, and content that makes up the internet, but he never tells the full story of most of these!

Skip this one and wait for Al Gore's "How I did it" expose.

[Mark · Rating 1 out of 5]

Next he'll tell us about the secret of Monkey Island

[Dave Rockwell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was cool. Not overly well written, but the facts rang true and it was well researched. I would recommend.

[Willy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Started - 10/1/08.