If you are looking for a good book about the origin of the Internet then I would recommend "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. There you will learn about ARPA and J.C.R. Licklider along with Bolt, Beranek and Newman who built the IMPs required to establish the first TCP/IP link between UCLA and SRI (Stanford Research Institute). They also have the story of the creation of email by Vint Cerf, the killer app of the early Internet. But if you consider the World Wide Web to be the Internet then I suggest "Weaving the Web" by Tim Berner-Lee who developed HTTP to share documents at CERN. Of course there is a lot more to it than this brief outline but it is an interesting tale worth knowing.
After these books it would then be time to look at Kernighan and Ritchie who created the C programming language (think curly brackets and ending semicolons) and also a look at BSD, Berkeley Systems Design, and the convoluted history of Unix replete with patent fights and AT&T. If you go further into the rabbit hole then there you might encounter Richard Stallman and GNU along with Linus Torvald of Linux fame. Linus wrote the kernel while Richard provided the userland . It gets really complicated really fast. I have not found any good histories for these but then I have not been looking for any for more than a few years. There may be some out there but I just do not know about them.
Words matter and words have histories, they have an etymology that shows how they evolved in both their spellings and their meanings. The orthography and meaning of words are always in a state of flux which explains why the concept of linguistic drift emerged along with dictionaries and their recording of standard meanings and pronunciations. I still have a dictionary from my father where the word computer is defined as someone who computes and not as a machine. Words are also a pet peeve of mine, my idiosyncrasy, my eccentricity. A word that is misspelled or mispronounced feels like the screech of chalk on a chalkboard and makes me cringe, and I mourn the disappearance of the use of "fewer" and its replacement with "less" in all situations. Humor me I am old.
Food for thought, even Chinese characters have an etymology as their forms and meanings have evolved from the tortoise shell to the computer screen.
Correction: Tomlinson wrote the email program not Cerf.
AT&T and BSD was not a patent case but much more complicated and occurred in a period some call the Unix Wars.
If you are looking for a good book about the origin of the Internet then I would recommend "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon. There you will learn about ARPA and J.C.R. Licklider along with Bolt, Beranek and Newman who built the IMPs required to establish the first TCP/IP link between UCLA and SRI (Stanford Research Institute). They also have the story of the creation of email by Vint Cerf, the killer app of the early Internet. But if you consider the World Wide Web to be the Internet then I suggest "Weaving the Web" by Tim Berner-Lee who developed HTTP to share documents at CERN. Of course there is a lot more to it than this brief outline but it is an interesting tale worth knowing.
After these books it would then be time to look at Kernighan and Ritchie who created the C programming language (think curly brackets and ending semicolons) and also a look at BSD, Berkeley Systems Design, and the convoluted history of Unix replete with patent fights and AT&T. If you go further into the rabbit hole then there you might encounter Richard Stallman and GNU along with Linus Torvald of Linux fame. Linus wrote the kernel while Richard provided the userland . It gets really complicated really fast. I have not found any good histories for these but then I have not been looking for any for more than a few years. There may be some out there but I just do not know about them.
Not a criticism but just an observation.
Not capoot but
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/kaput
Words matter and words have histories, they have an etymology that shows how they evolved in both their spellings and their meanings. The orthography and meaning of words are always in a state of flux which explains why the concept of linguistic drift emerged along with dictionaries and their recording of standard meanings and pronunciations. I still have a dictionary from my father where the word computer is defined as someone who computes and not as a machine. Words are also a pet peeve of mine, my idiosyncrasy, my eccentricity. A word that is misspelled or mispronounced feels like the screech of chalk on a chalkboard and makes me cringe, and I mourn the disappearance of the use of "fewer" and its replacement with "less" in all situations. Humor me I am old.
Food for thought, even Chinese characters have an etymology as their forms and meanings have evolved from the tortoise shell to the computer screen.
Appreciate the feedback!