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krj's review against another edition
3.0
Too much biography; the last few chapters about artificial life are the best.
toc's review against another edition
5.0
A wonderful tour thru the beginnings of the digital universe in the USA. not necessarily a history of the dawn of the computer age because Dyson waxes philosophical about it all. Wonderful insights and it has affected my view what I do. But he also brings to life many of the pioneers of the age. I'll probably read of again in a year or two.
But first I'll read Alan Turing and His Contemporaries from the British Computing Society for another take on the whole thing.
But first I'll read Alan Turing and His Contemporaries from the British Computing Society for another take on the whole thing.
lwb's review against another edition
2.0
Kind of disappointing. Much of the engineering is too telescopic - who today knows the internal workings of a vacuum tube? Worse the work tills toward the mystical toward the end. Much could have been done drawing parallels between the early digital evolution work and its modern resurgence, but nothing was. And so on ...
tanasay's review against another edition
5.0
Very interesting! I know just enough about computer programming that I felt as if I understood what was going on. This book led directly to my interest in The Making of the Atomic Bomb.
insertsthwitty's review against another edition
4.0
Interesting and overwhelming read (I probably need to take classes and do lots of supplementary reading to actually understand all of this. One of them is this: http://kcoyle.blogspot.co.uk/2012/11/turings-cathedral-or-women-disappear.html).
frudzicz's review against another edition
2.0
The book ends with the quote "There must be something about this code that you haven't explained yet", from Theodor W Lancaster to Mr Barricelli. Coincidentally, that's how I feel about the book as a whole. It seems that there was very little information in it except regarding the arrangement and composition of buildings, and rooms within those buildings.
cjgo's review against another edition
DNF
Got about halfway through and want to come back and revisit. Big fan of Maniac which is what led me here however I felt I was lost at times. I just don’t have to the patience for it at the moment, and will come back.
Got about halfway through and want to come back and revisit. Big fan of Maniac which is what led me here however I felt I was lost at times. I just don’t have to the patience for it at the moment, and will come back.
bupdaddy's review against another edition
3.0
Pretty interesting book about the first computers and the people who built them, and what problems they were first used for.
josh_paul's review against another edition
4.0
The points made in the 1 and 2-star reviews of this book are largely accurate:
1) Dyson includes a history of the Princeton, NJ area going back to pre-Columbian times, which has no clear direct relevance to the main topic of the book.
2) The book is highly digressive, occasionally wandering off into discussions of the author's own crackpot hypotheses. Personally, I found a lot of these interesting, but I could see getting irritated if you were looking for a straightforward history.
3) He probably gets some technical points about computer architecture wrong.
4) Some folks criticized the book because he spends a lot of time focused on John von Neumann. While it's true that he spends a lot of time talking about von Neumann, criticizing him for that is a bit like criticizing a book on evolution for focusing heavily on Darwin.
Whatever the book's flaws though, I believe Dyson did a great job of weaving together several stories that are often told separately, namely those of the Manhattan Project, the first digital computers, the early development of game theory, and evolutionary biology. Computers are at the center of this, but I took a big part of Dyson's point to be that you can't talk about early computing without talking about those other fields.
Since Dyson, presumably, wanted to keep the book under 250,000 pages he inevitably left out or glossed over some of the finer points, but that's a strategic choice, not a bug.
1) Dyson includes a history of the Princeton, NJ area going back to pre-Columbian times, which has no clear direct relevance to the main topic of the book.
2) The book is highly digressive, occasionally wandering off into discussions of the author's own crackpot hypotheses. Personally, I found a lot of these interesting, but I could see getting irritated if you were looking for a straightforward history.
3) He probably gets some technical points about computer architecture wrong.
4) Some folks criticized the book because he spends a lot of time focused on John von Neumann. While it's true that he spends a lot of time talking about von Neumann, criticizing him for that is a bit like criticizing a book on evolution for focusing heavily on Darwin.
Whatever the book's flaws though, I believe Dyson did a great job of weaving together several stories that are often told separately, namely those of the Manhattan Project, the first digital computers, the early development of game theory, and evolutionary biology. Computers are at the center of this, but I took a big part of Dyson's point to be that you can't talk about early computing without talking about those other fields.
Since Dyson, presumably, wanted to keep the book under 250,000 pages he inevitably left out or glossed over some of the finer points, but that's a strategic choice, not a bug.