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Designing an Internet is an excellent, book-long case study in a key theme in the history of technology: the technologies we rely upon might well have evolved along different paths, and thinking through possible futures requires understanding the decisions (and assumptions, and coincidences) that got us to where we are. In Designing an Internet, David D. Clark walks readers through how the Internet works, alternate ways an internet might work, and the history that led to one design winning over another.
This is partly a book about history ("The design of the Internet evolved as it was reduced to practice, and its design carries its history in various decisions and the interactions among them" [p. 129]) and it takes an approach that will be familiar to historians and STS scholars ("The Internet is deeply embedded in the larger social, political, and cultural context" [p. 2] and it "does not take the current Internet as a given" [p. 1]), yet Clark is not primarily a historian of technology. Rather, he himself was a key figure in the development of the Internet, and brings a practitioner's expertise and deep familiarity with...