This is a book review in progress. It might be sent to the ctrl-c.club zine at some point.
This book provides a view of the proto-Internet. It concentrates on the author’s experience of being online 1983-1993. There is a lot of material about the WELL (“Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link”) – the main virtual community in which Rheingold participated. Largely, it is about the ideals of internet community. The hopes, aspirations, and practices of the early internet. Reading now, in 2025, is an interesting experience — it puts the current internet in perspective.
Rheingold identifies the main tools of the internet as being e-mail, telnet, and ftp. All of these tools still exist, altough we don’t quite use them in the same way as in the 90s. There isn’t nearly as much telnet’ing in to servers and poking around as there use to be. We use ssh for such things but there are fewer services which run just by ssh’ing in1. We don’t get our files by browsing ftp servers. However, e-mail is still with us and functioning more or less unchanged.
Again and again in the book, Rheingold notes that whenever people create computer systems with the ability to message each other, there is a sudden and huge boom in traffic as people start chatting about everything via the messaging service. This was huge hassle for the military which original created computer networks for research purposes and found itself shoo-ing away SF-LOVERS . The French released TELETEL on the general populace, only to be shocked to see that people used it for messageries roses or sex chat. People don’t instinctively use computers to plan out nuclear war scenarios; they chat about science fiction and send sexy messages.
The is a lot of history, content, and stories from the “frontier” of computing. The book originally came out in 1993, and was revised in 2000. The additional chapter at the end talks about how much had changed since its original publication. To get a sense of perspective, Mosaic and other graphical browsers didn’t exist at the time of publication.
Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to see that tilde.town’s sign up works this way. You can try it via: ssh join@tilde.town. ↩︎
Published: Feb 25, 2025 @ 16:05.
Last Modified: Feb 28, 2025 @ 22:41.
Thanks for reading! If you have any comments or questions about the content, please let me know. Anyone can contact me by email.