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Where Wizards Stay Up Late, in detail
Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the history of ARPANET, the government-funded network that became the technical foundation of the internet. Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon trace the project from its origins in the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency in the early 1960s through the first live transmissions in 1969 and the gradual growth of the network through the 1970s. The book is built from interviews with the actual engineers — J.C.R. Licklider, Larry Roberts, Bob Kahn, Vint Cerf, and dozens of others — and from technical documents that had not been widely read outside the research community.
The story Hafner and Lyon tell is less heroic and more mundane than the mythology that surrounds the internet's creation. ARPANET was a military research program, but its founders were motivated more by scientific curiosity and practical convenience than by any grand vision of a global communications network. The early meetings were fractious; nobody agreed on how the system should work; the specifications were written by graduate students at a time when senior researchers couldn't be bothered. The first message sent over the network crashed it after two characters. Much of what made ARPANET work was improvised and accidental.
The book is strongest on the technical details — how packet switching works, why it was a radical departure from circuit switching, how the protocols that eventually became TCP/IP were argued into existence. Hafner and Lyon explain these concepts without condescension, and the sections on Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn's development of TCP are among the clearest accounts of that process available to a general reader.
The writing is dry in places, and the book makes no attempt to be more dramatic than the material supports. Readers looking for a populist narrative in the style of Michael Lewis will be disappointed. But as a technical and organizational history of one of the most consequential infrastructure projects of the twentieth century, it remains the definitive account. Anyone who uses the internet and wants to understand where it actually came from should read it.
The big ideas
- 1.
ARPANET was funded by the Department of Defense but driven by academic researchers who were more interested in computer science problems than military applications.
- 2.
Packet switching — breaking data into discrete packets that travel independently and reassemble at the destination — was the foundational technical idea that made the internet possible. It was not obvious, and it had serious skeptics.
- 3.
The first message sent over ARPANET in October 1969 was meant to be 'login.' The network crashed after the first two characters. The internet's birth was not auspicious.
