Quote Of The Day: IRS
Tuesday, July 06, 2010 20:44:14
"We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail."
- Dave Barry
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Joe Enos
"We'll try to cooperate fully with the IRS, because, as citizens, we feel a strong patriotic duty not to go to jail."
- Dave Barry
Tags: quote funny books
Comments:
Quote Of The Day: Business Book
Saturday, June 19, 2010 15:37:20
"These days it seems like any idiot with a laptop computer can churn out a business book and make a few bucks. That's certainly what I'm hoping. It would be a real letdown if the trend changed before this masterpiece goes to print."
- Scott Adams (The Dilbert Principle)
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Book Review: On The Way To The Web
Thursday, September 25, 2008 22:02:15
I recently finished reading On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and its Founders, by Michael A. Banks. The book deals with the years leading up to the internet revolution, and all the technologies that eventually came together to become what is now the World Wide Web.
My own personal experience with online services began in the mid 90's, so I missed out on quite a bit of the excitement. I used Prodigy, and had heard of America Online and CompuServe, but really didn't understand the events leading up to the information superhighway. My goal in reading this book was to understand some of the things I missed out on, and to get a better picture of how the web really got started.
The book is arranged reasonably chronologically - chapter one takes place mostly in the 1960's; until reading this, I never even considered the possibility that computers could do anything that long ago, let alone do any networking. As the chapters go by, we see the growth of networks, online services, bulletin boards, and email. We see CompuServe, Prodigy, AOL, and The Source, as well as several other unsuccessful products and companies. They even throw a few screen shots from some of these services back in the 80's - ridiculously lame by today's standards, but they were all the rage back then.
The book ends in the mid-1990's, when the one single web really replaced all of the individual online services. In addition, there's a summarized timeline from 1945-1994, showing each of the major advances leading up to the web.
I really enjoyed this book. It provided a lot of information that I never knew about how online services evolved throughout the past several decades, and gave me a better understanding of why some things are the way they are. The tone of the book is mostly dry facts and stories, but with a little humor and light-hearted fun thrown in on occasion to keep it entertaining as well as informative. And I don't believe Al Gore's name was mentioned once. Maybe he didn't invent the internet after all...
Highly recommended if you are interested in the topic...or if you were around for this stuff, and are just looking for some nostalgia.
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