A Brief History of the Future

John Naughton

An excellent - if slightly breathless - retelling of the history of the internet. It's also a love letter to the medium. A Brief History of the Future was first published in 1999 and it shows. The default search engine is Alta Vista, there is no broadband and John Naughton is still addressing - to a certain extent - those people (remember them?) who used to declare loftily "there's nothing on the internet". When did you last hear anyone say that or indeed joke about the World Wide Wait?

But leaving aside the rather dated proselytising the book is a very readable account of how we got from American military networks in the 1950s to eBay and hotornot.com. Via some extremely bright (mostly American) chaps working within a general system (which included the military, universities and big business) which allowed them enormous freedom to explore interesting ideas. Ray Tomlinson, the programmer who devised the "@" in email addresses, told a colleague, when showing him his fledgling email system, "Don't tell anyone! This isn't what we're supposed to be working on."

The birth of the internet brings to mind the phrase "success has many fathers". Naughton shows how the internet as we know it today was put together like a jigsaw: the result of different individuals beavering away at a variety of technological problems.

Most of us have a sketchy idea that the internet was devised to withstand nuclear attack and then there was some guy in Switzerland who invented HTML. But if you want to know more, John Naughton has the full story.