Author: Peter J. Bentley Publisher: Oxford University Press
Audience: General audience Reviewer: Mike James This book is
hard to pin down. It isn't really a history but it has a lot of
stories of the early days. It isn't really a technical overview
but it has lots of technical details. It isn't really a guide to
the future but it has plenty of speculations. It's possibly best
described as an interested person's guide to all things computer
related but this too doesn't hit the mark. The book is populated
by the ghosts of famous computer pioneers but a very specific
selection all based on Alan Turing and the people he interacted
with or had some influence on - Church, Von Neumann, Shannon,
etc. Sometimes the connections are a bit tenuous but this
doesn't matter too much. All the chapters are numbered in binary
and, after 000 being an introduction that looks at how computers
pervade our lives, Chapter 001 opens the book with a look a
Turing and computability - the really academic side of
computing. If you know a