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Inventing the Internet. By Janet Abbate. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1999. viii + 264 pp. Illustrations, bibliography, notes, and index. Cloth, $27.50. ISBN 0-262-01172-7.
Reviewed by Daniel R. Headrick
For a long time, books about the history of computers focused on hardware and the corporations that made them. Recently, however, historians of technology have begun asking more diffuse questions on topics like the development of software and networks and the role of users.
Janet Abbate's book belongs to this new wave. Inventing the Internet concentrates on the role of the Advanced Research Projects Agency in building the first nationwide computer network, the ARPANET. This is an important story, both from a technological point of view and as an example of the social construction of technology. Abbate's theme is that the Internet arose from an unusual combination of complementary traditions: "the command economy of military procurement, where specialized performance is everything and money is no object, and the research ethos of the university, where experimental interest and technical elegance take precedence over commercial application" (p. 145). The result was to make the Internet nonhierarchical, nonproprietary, and open to interested civilians, be they scientists, engineers, amateur enthusiasts, or start-up businesses. The original goal of the ARPANET was to allow uninterrupted communications in the event of a nuclear war. To do so required a decentralized system with multiple nodes linked in myriad ways. Instead of providing dedicated lines for each message, the designers of the network adopted packet switching, a system in which every message is broken up into small packets, each containing a part of...