Digital Hustlers
Living Large and Falling Hard in Silicon Alley
Chapter OneEvangelists and Entrepreneurs
The rapid proliferation of the Internet and the World Wide Web in the late 1990s would not have been possible without the PC revolution of the '80s. But the story of the Internet is much more a tale of the triumph of network computing—the science of getting computers to talk to one another.
Back in the day when the world's most powerful computers took up entire rooms, and were controlled by punch cards and powered by vacuum tubes, scientists began looking for ways to access the country's half dozen supercomputers from afar.
In the late 1950s, in response to the Soviet Union's early lead in the space race and the paranoia of the Cold War, President Eisenhower set up the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, later chanied to DARPA) to fund research and development of special projects for the Defense Department. One of its first tasks was the creation of a national computer network called the ARFANET to link these computers. The ARPANET would be a distributed network in which any computer could rea ... read full excerpt from Digital Hustlers: Living Large and Falling Hard in Silicon Alley ebook
