Negroponte was founder of The Media Lab at MIT, and this book (first published in 1987) is a survey of the work and ideas of that institution at (what could perhaps be thought of as) the dawn of the digital age: when the Internet was still an academic tool, before the WWW made it accessible to all; when cassettes were being replaced by CDs, before music completely lost its physical manifestation and turned into something that could be pulled out of the air