Gleick needs a time machine. He wants his reader to put him or herself back in the 1990s as much as possible when reading What Just Happened. We need to remember the internet as it was just starting out. Portable phones. Pagers. ATMs. The essays cover bugs in Microsoft (essays written in August 1992 and again in June of 1997), the transformation of cellphone communication, the question of caller ID and ethics, the Y2K Crisis (for which Gleick apologizes for reporting impending doom four years prior), the idea of anonymous spending is only possible with cash (Think about it. No other form of money is without identifiers of some sort.), humorous password creations - all with a snarky tone that is just delightful.
Gleick's opinion of internet pornography and its future is laughable. My favorite section was when Gleick unpacked an alert sent by MSN, pointing out vague language, half truths, cloudy communication, deliberate mis-directions, down playing failures, all with skillful ambiguity and clever concealment of the truth. Humor aside, Gleick makes you think about how far we have come. ( )

Well worth revisiting. I bought this when it was just published, and the essays it contained were important guideposts to how society might adapt to information technology (and vice versa). Almost two decades later, I've had an enormous amount of enjoyment out of seeing how things have panned out.

In the introduction to this collection of articles/essays on technology, Gleick comments on how much things have changed. He comments on what he got right and what he got wrong. And he laughs about a certain naiveté that existed when he wrote the articles. This introduction was written for the book’s publication in 2002. Imagine what another eight years has done.

Surprisingly, it has not made the articles irrelevant. Rather, it has made these snapshots in time even more amazing. And it makes the book that much more enjoyable. It would have been very easy for this to be a book we laugh at; a book where we sit in our smug future and guffaw at the yokels who had to use dial-up. However, Gleick’s writing is excellent and his style allows him to tell the stories in a way that is forward-looking enough that the pieces do not become stuck in the past. What this means is that each article, while, again, a snapshot of the times, still manages to speak to our current technological situations. Sure, he may be marveling at the idea that phones could change beyond recognition (a snapshot of a time where they just rang and we just answered them), but it is written in a way that makes the reader want to take a look and see what we take for granted right now that may be about to go through seismic change.

Well worth the read to remember what has happened, and to help prepare for what is to come. ( )

In this technological age, you may find yourself, when you have a moment to yourself, sitting and asked, "what just happened?"

Moore's law states that the number of transistors that can be placed inexpensively on an integrated circuit increases exponentially, doubling approximately every two years. This law is usually generalized to say that every two years, our computing power doubles.

So, imagine however many years ago it was that you first got a computer, and all the wonderful, speedy things you could do with it. Now, think how many years ago that was (call that number n). By Moore's law, a computer made with the latest technological advancements would be 2^(n/2) times faster than your first computer, which is impressive, unless you got your first computer today (if so, then welcome to the Internet!).

Gleick has collected here several articles written by him in the past, chronicling the information frontier from the front line. We see an earlier Microsoft dealing with their smaller collection of users. We see an early look at this Internet thing. We see a first-hand account of that era's emerging technologies, all of which we take for granted, or look at in the same light as we would a Model-T. And Gleick was there, writing it all down as it happened.

This book would definitely be of interest to computer "historians" (and thanks to Moore's law, a computer paleontologist only needs to dig around in a basement, and not the Badlands, to find "ancient" relics), as well as those interested enough in technology to not take it as for granted as most. ( )

Covers some interesting (although dated) ground. It makes me want to go back and re-live the mid-90's all over again. ( )