The Story Of The Internet

The Story of the Internet — From SPUTNIK to Smart Meters is a living history of the protocol that quietly runs our connected world.
It begins with a faint beep… beep… beep from Sputnik in 1957 — a sound that jolted the United States into creating ARPA, an agency tasked with ensuring America would never again be caught off guard by a technological surprise.

From the fragility of the centralised telephone system to the wild ambition of a network that could survive nuclear attack, this book takes you inside the moments that mattered:

• The “LO” crash of 1969 — the Internet’s unplanned first word.

• The 1977 bread truck test — proving a van, a satellite, and a mainframe could speak the same protocol.

• The all-or-nothing Flag Day of 1983 — when TCP/IP became the Internet’s common language overnight.

You’ll meet visionaries like Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn, who designed TCP/IP to connect any kind of network; Jon Postel, who kept the whole thing organised with trust and a text file; and countless unsung engineers whose late-night fixes and stubborn ingenuity kept the packets flowing.

From Cold War command systems to the birth of the World Wide Web, from screeching dial-up modems to low-orbit satellite constellations, this is a vivid account of how TCP/IP adapted to every era — broadband, smartphones, IoT, and even the first steps toward an Interplanetary Internet.

More than a technical history, it’s a human story: the people, culture, and choices that shaped a decentralised, open network used by billions. And it asks a provocative question — as the next fifty years unfold, can we keep that spirit alive?