When I was younger, I occasioned to write an essay about the history of the internet. I don’t have a copy in front of me, but I do recall that it ended up being practically a book report on the classic Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Hafner and Lyon. It gave a strong account of the technical and social factors that took us from ARPANET to TCP/IP. But apart from an excellent digression into Email, it’s sparse on the question of what factors outside of the specific technology BBN was building lead to the internet we knew in the aughts. It was a fine enough essay, I’m sure I received a passing grade for it, but I think my teacher actually had the right idea that I should have instead focused on the movie War Games.
But now, a student in a similar situation wouldn’t have to settle for inferring people’s understanding of computer networks from a movie; now they could pick up The Modem World and get a serious historical account and analysis of the proto-internet, the internet shaped thing that existed before TCP/IP became the dominant communication protocol.
While the notion of BBSs isn’t new to me (I watched the BBS Documentary, read a bunch of Textfiles.com, and frequent SDF which is BBS adjacent) The Modem World was fresh in two important ways: insight and rigor.
Most accounts of the BBS world tend to be primarily sources; people telling their own stories. You’ll find them in the pages of 2600 and the like. The Modem World goes many steps further in teasing out the statistics, explaining how affordances shaped culture, and related the history to present concerns. In this regard it’s a standout book, comfortably sitting alongside a good Platform Studies volume, or Exploding The Phone.
As far as Rigor goes, look no further than the absolutely lavish end notes for a bibliography of BBSing. Never satisfied to rest on a hand wave, the author is relentless in finding actual contemporary sources for so many assertions. I thought that it was going to rely much more heavily on the BBS Documentary than it ultimately did, because the Author dug up so much contemporary material! I appreciate the serious treatment as opposed to what frequently is the type of rose-tinted retro tech light journalism you see out of outfits that shall remain nameless.