Agent Palmer

From Netscape and the browser wars to the origins of the MP3, the rise of walled gardens such as AOL and Prodigy, the first online advertising, and e-commerce. To the iPhone and the internet in our pockets, and the creation, destruction, and aftermath of the dot com bubble; the Internet History Podcast covers it all and more.

It started back in 2014, on the 20th anniversary of the Internet Era as we know it when Netscape was founded. It made host Brian McCullough want to read a book that summed up the Internet Era. “The only problem was, no such book existed.”

When I was a child, if you had asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you that I wanted to be an “aerospace engineer.” I didn’t want to go into space or to the moon, but I wanted to be a part of it. Be a part of the process of human exploration, and of course, work for NASA. Alas, back then, I was good at math and science, but somewhere along the way, I moved from those subjects to literature and the arts, and any form of engineering disappeared from my future.

Before I get into this book and it’s subject (Claude Shannon), I must borrow from the authors in their acknowledgements, because they have succinctly described the reason that I picked up this book and others, like Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, Where Wizards Stay Up Late, even Masters of Doom, countless others on tech innovators like Bill Gates, The Steves (Jobs and Wozniak); and will continue to do so.

“…it is not the Internet that is unnatural, nor our feast of information, but a refusal to consider what their origins are…”

I always read through entire books. I’m not saying that to be a snob, but most Acknowledgments at the end of a book, give you a glimpse into a short commentary on the book process itself. However, I was thrown for a loop when I was reading the Acknowledgements of Bomber by Len Deighton, when I read the sentence; “This is perhaps the first book to be entirely recorded on magnetic tape for the I.B.M.72IV.”

Deighton’s modesty aside, “this is perhaps,” is definitely modest, the sentence was something that I couldn’t just read, it had to be looked into.

Declarations of War is a collection of short stories; 13 to be exact, a baker’s dozen if you will. Of, exactly what you would expect, war… But the title goes deeper. Each of these short stories contains a declaration about war. But that’s not as good of a title, though it could be argued that these stories are declarations on war, which makes sense despite the fact that my spell checker thinks “declarations on war” was a mistake. No, I meant it.

And like Deighton’s full size novels, I’m basing this off of the one’s that I have read. this story is a wealth of great intelligence in storytelling, dialogue, and of course, precisely written descriptions and detail.