Of all things Geek. I am…
Coffee has a rich, bold history, with all the ingredients of a well-produced premium cable miniseries: kings, spies, pirates, lovers, religion, politics, and war.
Over the years, its advocates and acolytes have called it “koffie,” “kahve,” “qahwah,” “quwwa,” “kaafa,” and “cafe,” and the path it took to your kitchen counter is rife with treachery, battles, seduction, and dumb luck.
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Sinatra: The Chairman by James Kaplan is the second of two books Kaplan wrote on the man, the myth, and the legend; the one and only Frank Sinatra. But I did not actually know this was the second of two books until I read about the first one (Sinatra: The Voice) in the acknowledgements.
Now, it did answer my one question as to why this book starts with the resurrection of his career in the mid-1950’s instead of at the beginning of his life. But as much as I can (at times) be a completionist, the book I read was the one of the two that I was more interested in.
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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.”
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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.
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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…”
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