Notes from "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet"
Last month, I read Empire of AI , a scathing tale of the invention of ChatGPT. This month, I read Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet , a much rosier story of the invention of a more important technology: the internet. Authors Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon cover the history starting in the 1960s all the way up to 1994, just two years before the book was published. 1 Here are my notes. This book argues that the space race was a precursor to the invention of the Internet, because it led to the creation of ARPA. This early sentence introduced one of the book’s main themes: The relationship between the military and computer establishments began with the modern computer industry itself. This tech-and-military romance has not gone away in 2025 . This is still a problem today, only partly solved by containers: In [the 1960s], software programs were one-of-a-kind, like original works of art, and not easily transferred from one machine to another. Packet switching (in contrast to store-and-forward) was apparently a simultaneous invention. I love simultaneous invention. Cold War nuclear tensions motivated Paul Baran to design a more resilient communications system. To him, “it was a necessary condition that the communications systems for strategic weapons be able to survive an attack”. Etymology of the word “packet”: Before settling on the word, [Donald Davies] asked two linguists from a research team in his lab to confirm that there were cognates in other languages. Every single person in this book is a man until page 74, where a woman is named but only to introduce two men. The book acknowledges the lack of gender diversity at times, but doesn’t go into it. It also omits any mention of other kinds of diversity. I suppose one could argue that this book is supposed to be an easygoing historical account with minimal editorializing, but I wish it were more critical. MIT’s first computer programming course was offered in 1951. This problem affects me in my modern software career: Eight months weren’t enough for anyone to build the perfect network. Everyone knew it. But BBN’s job was more limited than that; it was to demonstrate that the network concept could work. Heart was seasoned enough to know that compromises were necessary to get anything this ambitious done on time. Still, the tension between Heart’s perfectionism and his drive to meet deadlines was always with him, and sometimes was apparent to others as an open, unresolved contradiction. This was the first explicit mention of the internet inventors’ homogeneity: In keeping with the norms of the time, with the exception of Heart’s secretary, the people who designed and built the ARPA network were all men. Few women held positions in computer science. [Frank] Heart’s wife, Jane, had quit her programming job at Lincoln to raise their three children. They mentioned building something “to perform as well and as unobtrusively as a household socket or switch”. I liked the way this sentence was written. Reminds me of how people exhalt the creator of Roller Coaster Tycoon for doing everything in assembly: To program in assembly language was to dwell maniacally on the mechanism. This book has numerous anecdotes of brilliant idiosyncratic weirdos. Is that better than the homogenous tech bro of today? A little anecdote about the tensions between scientists and the war machine: [Severo] Ornstein was an outspoken opponent of the Vietnam War. By 1969 a lot of people who had never questioned their own involvement in Pentagon-sponsored research projects began having second thoughts. Ornstein had taken to wearing a lapel pin that said RESIST. The pin also bore the Ω sign, for electrical resistance, a popular antiwar symbol for electrical engineers. One day, before a Pentagon briefing, Ornstein conceived a new use for his pin. In meetings at the Pentagon, it wasn’t unusual for the men around the table to remove their jackets and roll up their shirt sleeves. Ornstein told Heart that he was going to pin his RESIST button onto a general’s jacket when no one was looking. “I think Frank actually worried that I would,” said Ornstein. (Ornstein didn’t, but he did wear his pin to the meeting.) Story of the first network test: The quality of the connection was not very good, and both men were sitting in noisy computer rooms, which didn’t help. So Kline fairly yelled into the mouthpiece: “I’m going to type an L !” Kline typed an L . “Did you get the L ?” he asked. “I got one-one-four,” the SRI researcher replied; he was reading off the encoded information in octal, a code using numbers expressed in base 8. When Kline did the conversion, he saw it was indeed an L that had been transmitted. He typed an O . “Did you get the O ?” he asked. “I got one-one-seven,” came the reply. It was an O . Kline typed a G . “The computer just crashed,” said the person at SRI. No one had come up with a useful demonstration of resource-sharing […] The ARPA network was a growing web of links and nodes, and that was it—like a highway system without cars. …so they did a big demo! There was a company people wanted to criticize, but the ARPANET was U.S. government property. Was it appropriate to criticize this company using ARPANET technology? Debates raged. Reminds me of how Douglas Crockford claims to have discovered, not invented, JSON : “Standards should be discovered, not decreed,” said one computer scientist in the TCP/IP faction. ARPANET was dismantled by the end of 1989. “How about women?” asked the reporter, perhaps to break the silence. “Are there any female pioneers?” More silence. I wish Where Wizards Stay Up Late had been more critical. Not because I want people to poo-poo the internet or its inventors, but because I think some history was lost. The book mentions tensions between the engineers and the military, but I would have loved to learn more. The authors acknowledge that the inventors were all men, but what were the consequences of that? There’s plenty of texture on the good and neutral sides of this story, but that’s only part of the saga. I’m no historian but I suspect this book will serve as a reference for future readers. It’s also fun to read a book written before the internet became such a dominant force; I’m sure a modern version would prioritize different details. If you know another book I might like, contact me ! For the eagle-eyed among you, I think I read an updated 1998 edition. ↩︎ For the eagle-eyed among you, I think I read an updated 1998 edition. ↩︎
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