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How the World Got Wired

A Brief History of the Internet

The whole arc of the internet in twenty-two short chapters — from a 1945 “memex” and the first packet, through the web given away, the dot-com crash, search and the smartphone, to the cloud and the two AI internets now taking shape.

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24chapters
105pages
62kwords

Contents

  1. Prologue — A Sunset in Da Nang
  2. A Memex and a Satellite
  3. Licklider’s Dream
  4. Packets
  5. The First Message
  6. The Constitution
  7. The Web, Given Away
  8. Ships and Sharks
  9. Routers and the People Who Built Them
  10. Mosaic, the Pivot
  11. The Day Everything Tipped
  12. Sock Puppets and Pet Food
  13. Three Ships and a Fire Sale
  14. What Survived
  15. Search
  16. The Phone in Your Pocket
  17. The Social Graph
  18. The Other Internet
  19. The Cloud
  20. A Naval Office in Arlington
  21. Why Hinton Went North
  22. 2012 and After
  23. Two AI Internets
  24. Epilogue — One Last Thing