In a period of six months in 1991 and 1992, Carl Malamud, technical author and journalist, raced madly around the world three times, inspecting computer networks of every kind in 56 cities in 21 countries, and promoting his dream of making the 19,000 pages of the recommended standards of the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) available in byte form to all Internet subscribers. This book is the detailed narrative of this dash and his experiences, with an often distracting emphasis on where, what, and how he ate and slept. Everything is described in a rushing, informal narrative style that would have benefitted from severe pruning and editing. Buried in the text and coated with the usual alphabet soup of current and proposed acronyms are detailed technical descriptions of existing computer networks, network research, and international efforts to provide and impede networking, together with the names of the parties involved.

The picture that this book gives of the worldwide scope and diversity of the Internet is of such interlocked variation of technology and purpose as to make it incredible that it works.

Malamud’s Bruno project failed to put the ITU standards on line chiefly because the ITU really does not want them to be either on line or generally available. He does feel that the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) model has been widely enough adopted “as the lowest common denominator of connectivity, taking its place as the logical successor to IBM’s RJE and Bisynch protocols” that, like COBOL, ISAM, and VTAM, it will have to be lived with.

I cannot recommend this as a good travel book or as a careful and thoughtful exploration of networking or the Internet. It is a source of often superficial information about networking in many places in the world last year. The clear evidence of its having been written in a great hurry, on the fly, and with little attention to clarity, completeness, correctness, unity, coherence, or emphasis, makes it a poor work. I was appalled to find that the author was able to find only one lunch place in Haleiwa on my own island. He should have consulted the Internet. There are two.