A Brief History of the Future

The Internet is one of the most remarkable things human beings have built. A millennium from now, historians will look back and marvel that people equipped with such clumsy tools succeeded in creating such a Leviathan. Yet we are already beginning to take it for granted. Most of us have no idea where the Internet came from, how it works or who created it (and why). Even fewer have any idea of what it means for society and the future.

This book is the first to cover the whole story of the Net -- from the earliest glimmerings of the ideas embodied in it, to the explosion of the World Wide Web in the 1990s. It is an impassioned attempt to celebrate the engineers and scientists who created the Internet 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 Norbert Wiener and Vannevar Bush -- to engineers like Larry Roberts and Tim Berners-Lee who implemented their dreams in software and hardware.

It is also an intensely personal book in which I examine the nature of my own enthusiasm for technology and trace its roots back to my childhood and my relationship with my father. What I have sought to produce is a celebration of vision and altruism, ingenuity and determination and, above all, of the power of ideas to change the world.

Publication details

UK: Publisher: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, September 1999
Price: Ł18.99

Now in paperback from Phoenix at 7.99

US: Publisher: Overlook Press, May 2000