JOHN NAUGHTON (b.1946)
A Brief History of the Future: the Origins of the Internet. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1999.
Professor and Observer columnist John Naughton revisits his 1999 celebration of the Internet. A first edition of this eminently readable account of how an era-defining technology was invented, by whom and why – and what it all meant to the author, including his predictions for where the Internet might take us. The book captured the zeitgeist of its time, as the author acknowledges in a 137-word inscription on the title page, signed and dated April 2022; ‘We saw it in truly Utopian terms […] With the 20/20 vision of hindsight, this seems naïve. But then, isn’t Utopianism always naïve?’.

Octavo. Original blue cloth, spine lettered in gilt, pictorial dust jacket.

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