The Backbone: A History of the Internet

From the viewpoint of today it is hard to imagine a world without the Internet. But the history of the Internet as revealed by The Backbone is anything but inevitable. In the fragmented online world of the 1980s, everything from state control of data networks to anarchic decentralization appeared to be on the table.

Chris McDonald takes us on a tour of five decades of digital communications, from the unraveling of almighty AT&T to the Internet’s surprising triumph; from the clique of eccentrics who created interactive computing in the 1950s, to the government bureaucrats who helped bring networking to the masses decades later.

It is a tale of underdogs and outsiders, of political struggles and competing ideologies, of inventions built for one purpose but accidentally used for another, and of an Internet born with all the energy and optimism of youth now struggling into middle age.