Book by Tim Danton: “…tells the story of the birth of the technological world we now live in, all through the origins of twelve influential computers built between 1939 and 1950.
This book transports you back to a time when computers were not mass produced, but lovingly built by hand with electromechanical relays or thermionic valves (aka vacuum tubes). These were large computers, far bigger than a desktop computer. Most would occupy (and warm!) a room. Despite their size, and despite the fact that some of them would help win a war, they had a minuscule fraction of the power of modern computers: back then, a computer with one kilobyte of memory and the ability to process one or two thousand instructions per second was on the cutting edge. The processor in your mobile phone probably processes billions of instructions per second, and has a lot more than one kilobyte of main memory.
In 1940, a computer was someone who ploughed through gruelling calculations each day. A decade later, a computer was a buzzing machine that filled a room. This book tells the story of how our world was reshaped by such computers — and the geniuses who brought them into being, from Alan Turing to John von Neumann.
You’ll discover how these pioneers shortened World War II, and learn hidden truths that governments didn’t want you to know. But this isn’t just a story about how these computers came to be, or the fascinating people behind them: it’s a story about how a new world order, built on technology, sprang into being.
This book is a world tour through the modern history of computing, and it begins in 1939 with the first electronic digital computer, the Atanasoff-Berry computer (ABC). From there, the book moves on to the Berlin-born Zuse Z3 and the Bell Labs’ Complex Number Calculator, before we enter the World War II era with Colossus, Harvard Mark I, and then ENIAC, the first general-purpose digital computer…(More)”
