A Brief History of the Future by John Naughton
The Internet is the most remarkable thing human beings have built since the Pyramids. A millennium from now, historians will look back at it and marvel that a people equipped with such clumsy tools succeeded in creating such a Leviathan. John Naughton's book intersperses wonderful personal stories with an authoritative and beautifully written account of where the net actually came from, who invented it and why, and where it might be taking us. Most of us have no idea of how the Internet works or who created it. Even fewer have any idea of what it means for society and the future. A Brief History of the Future is an impassioned attempt to rescue the Internet from the condescension of posterity, to celebrate the engineers and scientists who created it and to explain the values and ideas that drove them. Its heroes are the people who laid the foundations of the post-modern world -- from visionaries like Robert Taylor, Norbert Wiener and Ted Nelson to the engineers -- Paul Baran, Donald Davies, Larry Roberts, Bob Kahn and Tim Berners-Lee -- who implemented their dreams in hardware and software. In a cynical age, John Naughton has not lost his capacity for wonder. In this book, he writes about the Net in the way that Nick Hornby writes about football. He examines the nature of his own enthusiasm for technology and traces its roots in his lonely childhood and in his relationship with his father. A Brief History of the Future is an intensely personal celebration of vision and altruism, ingenuity and determination and above all, of the power of ideas, passionately felt, to change the world.
John Naughton has been an academic and a journalist all his working life. Heis a Senior Lecturer in Systems at the Open University, and since 1987 has written a weekly column for the Observer which has won him several major awards including three nominations as Critic of the Year. He is also a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and the Director of the College's Press Fellowship P
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780297643302 |
| ISBN 10 | 0297643304 |
| Title | A Brief History of the Future |
| Author | John Naughton |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Orion Publishing Co |
| Year published | 1999-09-09 |
| Number of pages | 384 |
| Prizes | Short-listed for Aventis Prizes for Science Books: General Prize 2000, Short-listed for Aventis Prize for Science Books 2000 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |