Ask HN: Where can one learn about the history of the internet and the protocols?

The book is a decent read. Like you said, it linearly presents the companies and people involved, mostly ARPA and BBN. Not a technical book, so don't expect anything in-depth on protocols, more like analogies laypeople can understand.

Excerpt:

To avoid sounding too declarative, he labeled the note “Request for Comments” and sent it out on April 7, 1969. Titled “Host Software,” the note was distributed to the other sites the way all the first Requests for Comments (RFCs) were distributed: in an envelope with the lick of a stamp. RFC Number 1 described in technical terms the basic “handshake” between two computers—how the most elemental connections would be handled. “Request for Comments,” it turned out, was a perfect choice of titles. It sounded at once solicitous and serious. And it stuck.

“When you read RFC 1, you walked away from it with a sense of, ‘Oh, this is a club that I can play in too,’” recalled Brian Reid, later a graduate student at Carnegie-Mellon. “It has rules, but it welcomes other members as long as the members are aware of those rules.” The language of the RFC was warm and welcoming. The idea was to promote cooperation, not ego. The fact that Crocker kept his ego out of the first RFC set the style and inspired others to follow suit in the hundreds of friendly and cooperative RFCs that followed. “It is impossible to underestimate the importance of that,” Reid asserted. “I did not feel excluded by a little core of protocol kings. I felt included by a friendly group of people who recognized that the purpose of networking was to bring everybody in.” For years afterward (and to this day) RFCs have been the principal means of open expression in the computer networking community, the accepted way of recommending, reviewing, and adopting new technical standards.

https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1

You will find an interesting point of view on these matters presented in:

  "Patterns in Network Architecture: A Return to Fundamentals"
  by John Day
  Prentice-Hall 2008
  ISBN 0-13-225242-2

I've read an absurd number of Internet histories. And I think one of the problems with studying the history of the Internet is that it very quickly grew up and out of the small group of people who got it started, and thus writing its history must take into account the increasing number of perspectives that chronologically track its development. Also, it can be very difficult to disambiguate the history of the Internet with that of general computing. The Internet developed and continues to develop both simultaneously influencing, and being influenced by, the development of general computing. Sometimes just reading the changelog of a particular old piece of infrastructure software(BIND, AT&T UNIX) can reveal more to you than reading about the Internet specifically.

I could throw tons of links here, but below are a couple that provide detailed accounts that people may find interesting.

RSSAC023: History of the Root Server System. I'm biased because I helped edit this a little ;)

https://www.icann.org/en/system/files/files/rssac-023-04nov1...

Chapter 3 of my friend Ashwin's dissertation. It's IMO a very well written and accessible social history of the Internet.

https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/ashwin-...

Really old messages on the namedroppers ML like this. If someone could figure out how to view all messages on namedroppers I would be eternally grateful.

https://marc.info/?l=namedroppers&m=95837667426457&w=2

You can start with an introductory overview ( Chuck Severance's Internet History on coursera ) and then search the RFCs, books and material afterwards for a more detailed view.

The coursera course is great because it covers the internet from inception to today and includes interviews with individuals who made great contributions along the way. It is impressive the people who he was able to track down and interview.

Twenty years on, Connected: An Internet Encyclopedia is still my go-to resource for a human readable understanding of what makes the Internet tick: https://www.freesoft.org/CIE/