I second the Victorian Internet recommendation!

The book makes a good argument that if you plucked someone from the late 1800s and brought them into the modern day, the internet might be the invention they are least impressed by, since they basically already had one.

The similarities between the telegraph network and the internet go way deeper than I expected. Both at the technology level, like domain names, encryption, data compression, routing tables, etc., and also at the social level like hackers, online dating, insane levels of hype like predicting world peace, and government regulation unable to keep up with the technology. Sometimes I forget how insanely smart people have always been. Awesome book. More timeless than the average book about technology