Rating:  - Good history of early days
This book is a good history of the early days of the Internet. I would recommend to anyone who is interested in the history of the net before it really took off. Unfortunately the history of the internet is lacking in compelling personalities that would make the history more interesting. This is especially true compared to the history of the PC with the likes Steve Jobs and Bill Gates. The men who built the internet were a bright bunch of men, but lacking in ego that made for the battles of the PC era. The lack of personalities is not the book's fault, but just makes the story a little less interesting than some other technology history books.
Rating:  - An exceptional recording
A visual record, and a very similar book, is the documentary: Nerds 2.0.1 by Stephen Segaller who credits Katie's book. Both of these books give an excellent, if a tiny bit incomplete feel for what the ARPAnet was like. Minor typographic errors make me want to rate it 4.5, but I'm not allowed a fraction, and giving Katie the benefit of rounding, and I am a tough editor, she gets 5 stars.
If you do not have a chance to thumb through this book in a store or a library, this book is not a technical book; there are no really technical observations. This book will not tell you how to send email but will tell the story of the @-sign (not easily available on some foreign keyboards). There are no photos or maps (see Segaller's book for those but buy both). The value of Katie's book is the perspective of the computer communications community. I was there as a college freshman, and Katie has really captured much of the sense (as it can be written); specifically the frustration, but also the excitement of the early net. I really think the world needs a working ARPAnet (running NCP, not TCP/IP) to give a feel for what this was all like. The Net changed my perspective on life (I was one of those who pulled all nighters), and this book will give some of the sense of why all those on the early net did those.
The treatment on the Usenet and on the Bitnet are a tiny bit thin. I can think of 1-2 people who really deserved mention in the book [Frank Kuo @SRI and U. of HI being one], these are minor slights which are the limitations of paper. The chronology and the resources are as I remember them from my time during that period (1973-1975) of exposure.
My biases: I know Katie and he ex-, and helped promote by posting to Usenet the announcement for this book and her earlier Cyberpunks book. When this book came out, I was stunned how her writing captured the experience from a person on the sideline. I find myself now working with many of people in this book. The ARPAnet was precisely the kind of experience people send their children to college to experience. It's too bad that more people could not have similar exposures.
Rating: - An engaging reading
This book provides an interesting account on the early days of internet. The story will make anyone who is fascinated by the impact of internet today to appreciate the effort of its early pioneers. Anyone would wish that they were there witnessing one of the man greatest accomplishment in the making.
Rating: - Extremely good
While we all thought the Internet started in the early 90's it went back much longer. This very good book describes what movements it took before a worldwide computer network could come into existence, perhaps focussing slightly too much on the American situation (there's also Internet in Japan and Europe). The person of J.C.R. Licklider deserves more attention than he's been getting until now, perhaps because he was not a science fiction but a very real life technology thinker. This books restores to him the glory he deserves. Likewise the story that ARPANet was built to survive an atomic war is seriously debunked with quotes from all the initial Internet players; ARPANet was an army experiment, nothing more. See what it's become.
Rating: - Internet is older than you thought
This is an excellent book for all those who would guess that Bolt, Beranek and Newman is a law firm. It may sound like one, but it isn't. BBN - now a subsidiary of GTE/Verizon - is a company which is most intimately tied to the birth of what is nowadays known as the internet. And if the BBN's marketing guys would have been half as good as their engineers, we would probably hear a lot more about BBN today and less about, say, Cisco.
In a clear and highly readable style, Hafner and Lyon have covered the history of the packet switching networks with encyclopedic breadth. You'll learn both about the early theoretical fathers of packet switching, like Paul Baran and Donald Davies; you have the people in the DoD's Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) like Joseph Licklider, Bob Taylor or Larry Roberts, who not only had a grand view of computer networking or obtained the necessary governmental funding, but were also able to specify their wishes precisely enough that the engineers were able to build the network based on their plans. And finally, there is Frank Heart's team at BBN, guys who actually built the darn thing.
The subtitle - The origins of the internet - is well chosen. Most of the book focuses on the years 1968-1972, from Roberts' draft proposal, to the 1972 international conference on computer communication. Other development, either earlier or later, is covered only fragmentary. There are other interesting stories, like the origins of USENET, internet news exchange service, but they are not the scope of this book.
The book leaves a pleasant impression that the authors actually understand the necessary technical background of the topic they are writing about. Some diagrams might help further, but I am sure that numerous metaphors used in the book will also alone help the casual reader to understand the idea of packet switching. Chapter notes and bibliography section deserve special praise, and the subject index comes in handy, too. Overall, a very satisfying book.
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