Investigates 12 great moments in the history of the Internet. Includes amazing facts along with information about key players and innovations.

The Innovators is Walter Isaacson's revealing story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. It is also a history of the digital revolution and a guide to how innovation really happens. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? Isaacson begins with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter,...

When your Internet cable leaves your living room, where does it go? Almost everything about our day-to-day lives--and the broader scheme of human culture--can be found on the Internet. But what is it physically? And where is it really? Our mental map of the network is as blank as the map of the ocean that Columbus carried on his first Atlantic voyage. The Internet, its material nuts and bolts, is an unexplored territory. Until now. In Tubes, journalist...

"Starting in the early 1960s, there was fear in America about the proliferation of computer database and networking technologies. People worried that these systems were going to be used by both corporations and governments for surveillance and control. Indeed, the dominant cultural view at the time was that computers were tools of repression, not liberation -- and that included the ARPANET, the military research network that would grow into the Internet...

"The never-more-necessary return of one of our most vital and eloquent voices on technology and culture, the author of the seminal Close to the Machine. The last twenty years have brought us the rise of the internet, the development of artificial intelligence, the ubiquity of once unimaginably powerful computers, and the thorough transformation of our economy and society. Through it all, Ellen Ullman lived and worked inside that rising culture of...

Allison is drowning under the weight of her manipulative stage magician father. When he brings home the family's first computer, she escapes into a thrilling new world where she meetings Samir, a like-minded new online friend who has just agreed to run away from home with her. After moving to a new town and leaving all of his friends behind, Richard receives a mysterious note in his locker with instructions on how to connect to 'Evol BBS, ' a dial-in...

"Tech-guru Brian McCullough delivers a rollicking history of the internet, why it exploded, and how it changed everything. The internet was never intended for you, opines Brian McCullough in this lively narrative of an era that utterly transformed everything we thought we knew about technology. In How the Internet Happened, he chronicles the whole fascinating story for the first time, beginning in a dusty Illinois basement in 1993, when a group of...

"In the early 1990s, Heather McCalden lost both her parents to AIDS. Orphaned by age ten, she was raised by her grandmother in Los Angeles, a mythologized and fragmented city, also known as a ground zero for the virus and its destruction. Years later, unmoored by grief, she begins exploring the history of HIV online as a way to deal with her loss. This leads her to discover that AIDS and the internet developed on parallel timelines, giving basis to...