Reviews

A few reviews of the book have been published. The criticisms that they make are pretty accurate:

Review by Cian O'Luanaigh in the CERN Courier: https://cds.cern.ch/record/1734991 (see the 3rd item)

Review by Brian Clegg: http://popsciencebooks.blogspot.com/2014/05/network-geeks-brian-e-carpenter.html

Review by Dave Crocker: https://ipj.dreamhosters.com/wp-content/uploads/issues/2013/ipj16-2.pdf (Internet Protocol Journal, Volume 16, No. 2, June 2013, p. 31 - the link downloads the whole issue of the journal)

Review by A. Bultheel: https://web.archive.org/web/20150906014846/http://www.euro-math-soc.eu/review/network-geeks (European Mathematical Society newsletter, August 2013)

Errata in Network Geeks

The purpose of the rest of this page is to record errors that have been noticed. Page numbers are given for the printed version.

• • Page 15, 3rd paragraph: Some years ago Alan Hawkins, a collector of military items, came across my grandfather Edward Winnard's service medal from the South African war, which was for sale by a dealer. Finding me as a result of this book, he kindly asked if I wanted to acquire the medal. The family decided to leave it for him, but he took the trouble to look up both my grandfathers' military records and to send me scanned copies. One small error emerged from these when I finally studied the details. My father was not the firstborn son as I always remembered. In fact his brother Alfred Richard Carpenter, my Uncle Alf, was first. I then discovered via Google that I wasn't the first in the family to file a patent: Uncle Alf was a co-inventor on three British patents in 1935, 1938 and 1950, and a US patent in 1951, all to do with "Apparatus for Use in Detecting the Passage of Wheeled Vehicles", i.e. the rubber pads that were used for many years to detect vehicles approaching traffic lights. This must have been quite lucrative for his employer, the Siemens and General Electric Railway Signal Company in London.

  • Page 28: Our neighbours were called "Read", not "Reid", and their younger daughter's name was "Lyndon" not "Lyndan". (Thanks to Geoff Morley, my schoolfriend, for looking them up in a Kelly's directory.)

  • Page 33: My headmaster J.C. Larkin was actually a second cousin of Philip Larkin. (Also thanks to Geoff.)

  • Page 34: Geoff recalls correctly that we had to choose between German, Greek and geography. So when I later chose biology, I must have done so to avoid some other subject.

  • Page 37 (footnote): In fact, Tutte broke the cypher of the Lorenz SZ-40/42 teleprinter cipher attachment. The term Geheimschreiber properly refers to a very similar Siemens device (see http://www.cryptomuseum.com/crypto/lorenz/sz40/). (Also thanks to Geoff.)

  • Page 41: Simon Hoggart was actually four days older than me. Sadly, he died in January 2014. (Also noted by Geoff.)

  • Page 119: The unfortunate domain name registered by Procter & Gamble in 1995 was diarrhea.com. I mis-copied it as diarreah.com, and when I checked all the URLs before publication, the incorrect one did not fail, because it was speculatively registered in 2000 by somebody. Unfortunately, this misled me even though Vint Cerf noticed the error when reading the book before publication. Eventually, John Levine set me straight. In any case, diarrhea.com has been there since August 1995.

  • Page 129, 3rd paragraph: "Hospital" is misspelt. (Thanks to Alan Crutcher, one of my former colleagues at CERN, for reporting this.)

  • Page 134, 2nd paragraph: The figure reference should be five lines earlier. (Thanks to Alan again.)

Page updated 2024-07-07 15:42 NZST.