There are two paths to the Internet we use today. The first began as ARPANET, a US government-sponsored network originally commissioned to facilitate defense communications, motivated in part by the Soviet Union’s 1957 launch of Sputnik that caused the US some humiliation. The second came from the desire to provide ready access to knowledge and data. This path began with the availability of dial-up access to computers, taking the form of commercial online services. The first such major service was Lockheed’s Dialog database (still online today). The early services were expensive and used mostly by companies. The high cost of telephone access, especially long distance, gave rise to online service providers exemplified by CompuServ, which offered various types of information, and Tymnet, which offered a data network. Tymnet created points of presence accessible by local phone calls, using dedicated lines to move data inter-city between customer and computer. As it grew, the well-managed CompuServ created its own data network.

Meanwhile, the personal computer industry was ramping up, first with hobbyist kits, and then with the Apple and IBM lines that opened the floodgates. Home-brewed bulletin boards (BBS) were a very early development. Computer users added modems to their systems and dialed up to BBSs containing topics of interest. As the number of private parties who could access computer services grew, companies such as CompuServ began to add features, such as their own bulletin boards, email, gaming, and product information, to attract users. As the capabilities of personal computers grew, the services added menu-driven, and later graphics-based, user interfaces to increase ease-of-use and attract a less technical audience.

For most of this history, the government-sponsored Internet was closed to the public, available only to researchers in academia and government agencies. The big breakthrough occurred in 1992, when the commercial service Delphi, which served a community that had permission to use the then-closed Internet, received permission to give them, and as a side effect the general public, access. The connections were made. In 1993, federal legislation authorized public access to the Internet. After that, the private data networks became redundant. Some of the online services evolved into Internet service providers (ISPs), providing fee-based connections to the now-public Internet; others left the market.

This book takes us on both paths, but focuses primarily on the growth of publicly available services. It covers the careers of pioneers such as William von Meister and Steve Case. Von Meister was an entrepreneur and raconteur, who was behind a number of the early start-ups. Von Meister had the ability to envision ways to combine technology elements to build services, but was not particularly interested in running the companies he started. He thus left a trail of technology companies important to the developing online world. Case began as a marketer for Pizza Hut, got into computing via his older brother, and ended up as the CEO of the giant America Online.

In an otherwise entertaining book, one thing about the physical format of the book, at least in the review copy, deserves mention. In what appears to be a deliberate choice, the font and style used for the main text looks like a print-out made on a dot-matrix printer of the era, one with a periodically fading ribbon. If one looks closely, one can see the dots comprising the letters, and every fifth page looks washed out, always on the same side of the page. Such pages can be challenging to read. It is annoying to know another will appear just a few pages ahead.

The book provides a lot of detail, but maintains a good pace, so the reader doesn’t get bogged down. Useful appendices include a timeline-form summary of developments, a bibliography, and a list of online founders. Anyone interested in recent history (but ancient history in Internet time) will find this work interesting. It is a good addition to the computing milieu.