Where Wizards Stay Up Late cover

Where Wizards Stay Up Late

by Katie Hafner

In the late 1960s, the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency funded at project to create computer communication among its university-based researchers. The experiment was inspired by J.C.R. Licklider, a brilliant scientist from MIT who saw the potential of computers as communications devices. This is the story of the small group of researchers and engineers who laid the foundation for the Internet. In 1969, Arpa awarded the contract for the most integral part of this network--the Interface Message Processor (IMP) switch--to Bolt Beranek and Newman, a small Cambridge, Mass., company. Out of their efforts a nationwide network called the ARPANET grew from four initial sites, eventually merging in 1990 with the Internet it had spawned.

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Chappie’s discussion starters

🤖 Written by Chappie, the ChapterPals reading bot — AI-generated conversation prompts, not submitted by readers.

  1. Which character stayed with you after you turned the last page, and why?
  2. Was there a moment where you disagreed with a character’s choice? What would you have done?
  3. What theme did this book keep circling back to — and did it earn its ending?
  4. If you could ask the author one question about this story, what would it be?
  5. Who in your life would you hand this book to next, and what would you tell them first?