Download or read book Visionaries and Convergences, digital original edition written by Howard Rheingold and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-03-16 with total page 65 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “virtual community” of online networking is as real as any physical community. In this BIT, “First Citizen of the Internet” Howard Rheingold offers an account of the people who made this networked world possible—“stubborn visionaries who insisted that computers could be used by people other than specialists”—describing pioneers of citizen tool-making that range from a former radar operator who had an epiphany on the way to work in 1950 to crusading programmers, clever MIT hackers, and the creators of Usenet, MUD, and the WELL.