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A Brief History of the Future
Chapter list

PART I: WONDERMENT
1  Radio Days An attempt to explain why I am fascinated by the Net  See this extract for a flavour.
2  The Digital Beanstalk I got fed up dealing with politicians and businessmen who think the Net is some kind of pipe down which stuff can be pumped at kids (who are seen, incidentally, as empty vessels to be 'filled').  So I started saying to them "Look, it isn't a pipe, it's a beanstalk up which children climb, like Jack in the fairy tale, into other worlds".  It was worth it just to see the look of incomprehension on their faces.
3  A terrible beauty? What is the Net, really?  In the end, I fastened on a metaphor from a poem by W.B. Yeats.

PART II: A Brief History of the Future
4  Origins My quest for the deep roots of the Net.  Goes back to MIT in the 1920s,1930s and 1940s and people like Norbert Wiener, Vannevar Bush, Claude Shannon and JCR Licklider.  It's always earlier than you think.
5  Imps The origins of the ARPANET.  IMPs were the 'Interface Message Processors' which were the basic message switches at the heart of the network.  When the Boston firm of Bolt Baranek and Newman landed the contract to build the ARPANET, their local senator, Ted Kennedy, sent  a telegram congratulating them on their idea for 'Interfaith Message Processors'.
6 Hot potatoes The technology which underpinned the ARPANET was independently invented not once but twice -- the first time by a wonderful guy called Paul Baran who was trying to design a communications system which could function after a nuclear strike.   His design involved a network of computers  which passed on messages as quickly as possible.  Baran called it 'hot potato routing'.
7  Hindsight The people most opposed to Baran's ideas were the guys who ran AT&T -- the US telephone monopoly.  This chapter asks how could they have been so obtuse -- and suggests a tentative explanation.
8  Packet post Packet-switching was one of the great ideas which underpinned the Net.  It was independently invented by Donald Watts Davies in England.  He and his colleagues were the ones who finally alerted the ARPANET crowd to packet-switching and the ideas of Paul Baran.
9  Where it's @ E-mail -- Ray Tomlinson's Big Idea.  Where it came from, and how it developed.
10 Casting the Net How the ARPANET metamorphosed into the Internet by means of a great idea called TCP/IP.
11 The Poor Man's ARPANET The story of how USENET evolved from the Unix community.
12 The Great Unwashed The origins and growth of the home-brewed network which became Fidonet.  If the Internet turned to strawberry jam tomorrow, Fidonet would still be up and running.
13 The Gift Economy The rise and rise of the Free Software movement and its evolution into the Open Source movement. Here's an extract about what makes the Open Source concept so powerful.

PART III:  Only connect...
14 Web Dreams The origins of the World Wide Web, from Vannevar Bush's 1930s ideas, through Doug Engelbart's NLS system, Ted Nelson's Hypertext and Bill Atkinson's HyperCard to Tim Berners-Lee's Big Idea.
15 Liftoff The story of Marc Andreessen, Mosaic and the <IMG> tag, and the launch of Netscape.
16 Home Sweet Home Netscape's near-death experience and its late conversion to the attractions of Open Source software. See this extract for a flavour.
17 Epilogue The wisdom of the Net.  There's an extract here, if you're interested.

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