How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhoneA Library Journal Best Book of the Year 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 college kids set off a once-in-an-epoch revolution with what would become the first “dotcom.” Depicting the lives of now-famous innovators like Netscape’s Marc Andreessen and Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, McCullough also reveals surprising quirks and unknown tales as he tracks both the technology and the culture around the internet’s rise. Cinematic in detail and unprecedented in scope, the result both enlightens and informs as it draws back the curtain on the new rhythm of disruption and innovation the internet fostered, and helps to redefine an era that changed every part of our lives. |
Contents
AMERICA ONLINE AOL and the Early Online Services | |
BIG MEDIAS BIG WEB ADVENTURE Pathfinder HotWired and | |
HELLO WORLD The Early Search Engines and Yahoo | |
GET BIG FAST Amazon com and the Birth of Ecommerce | |
TRUSTING STRANGERS eBay Community Sites and Portals | |
RIP MIX BURN The iPod iTunes and Netflix | |
A THOUSAND FLOWERS BLOOMING PayPal AdWords Googles IPO and Blogs | |
WEB 2 0 Wikipedia YouTube and the Wisdom of Crowds | |
The Social Network Facebook | |
THE RISE OF MOBILE Palm BlackBerry and Smartphones | |
ONE MORE THING The iPhone | |
OUTRO | |
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS | |
BLOWING BUBBLES The Dotcom | |
IRRATIONAL EXUBERANCE The Dotcom Bubble | |
POP Netscape vs Microsoft AOL + Time Warner and the Nuclear Winter 11 IM FEELING LUCKY Google Napster and the Rebirth | |
NOTES | |
INDEX | |