BY SCOTT ROSENBERG the Internet has always been scented with nonconformity. The people who created the network's precursors in the '60s and '70s weren't suits at AT&T or IBM but engineers at universities and small consulting firms -- the kind of young men likely to spend their spare time reading fantasy and science fiction or playing Dungeons & Dragons. The title of "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet" promises to map a technological revolution rooted in psychic terrain where Tolkien holds sway. Authors Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon quote a programmer who recalls that, in the Net's early days, when every host machine had a given name, "everyone wanted to be named Frodo." "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" is in many ways an essential book: the first effort to give a general audience an account of the earliest inspired efforts to link computers to other computers across long distances, turning number-crunching behemoths into a nimble new communications medium. It's a conscientious work that will give readers some valuable perspective on a network that might have seemed to just pop out of nowhere sometime in 1994. It's also a little disappointing. Despite their title, Hafner and Lyon largely fail to explain or even explore the fundamental irony of their story: how the Net's inventors managed to spend millions of Pentagon dollars during the most unpopular war in history to build a marvelous new digital environment where they could stay up late -- and name their computers Frodo. "Where Wizards Stay up Late": Chronicling the story but not the soul of the Internet.