Brief History of the Future: The Origins of the Internet, A

This book is an impassioned attempt to rescue the Internet from the condescension of posterity, to celebrate the engineers and scientists who created it and to explain the values and ideas that drove them. Its heroes are the people who laid the foundations of the post-modern world-from visionaries like Joseph Licklider, Robert Taylor, Douglas Engelbart, Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush and Ted Nelson, to the engineers-Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Larry Roberts, Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf and Tim Berners-Lee-who fashioned their dreams in hardware and software. A Brief History of the Future is an intensely personal celebration of vision and altruism, ingenuity and determination and, above all, of the power of ideas to change the world.