Where wizards stay up late (1996)

Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon deliver a thrilling retrospective on the small team of engineers and DARPA visionaries who designed the ARPANET. The narrative dramatises the contentious disputes over packet-switching architecture against established telecommunications giants, culminating in Bolt Beranek and Newman's breakthrough Interface Message Processor. It provides a gripping look at how an eccentric cadre of researchers established the resilient, decentralised protocols that underpin the global internet today.