Walter Isaacson The Innovators.pdf

No history of the digital revolution is complete without the internet. Isaacson unveils the chaotic, collaborative creation of the ARPANET. He explains that the internet was designed by government researchers (like J.C.R. Licklider) and then turned over to academics. The PDF details the battle between Tim Berners-Lee, who gave us the World Wide Web for free, and Marc Andreessen, who commercialized it via Netscape.

The book’s final, soaring act is the creation of the Internet and the Web. You see Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, two men in khakis, inventing TCP/IP on hotel napkins. You see Tim Berners-Lee, a shy Englishman at CERN, inventing the World Wide Web not for profit, but because he couldn’t stand the inefficiency of different computers not talking to each other. He gave it away. For free. Walter Isaacson The Innovators.pdf