Incredible book! I'm so glad that it found the way to me somehow (don't remember how it happened, maybe from some tweet from Bret Victor?). I wish I'd read this book a decade earlier. – The culture at ARPA & Xerox PARC that enabled all this, and the role that so many people played: Vannevar Bush, Norbert Wiener, Von Neumann, Claude Shannon, Alan Turing, JC Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Ivan Sutherland, Alan Kay, Vin Cerf & so many more – The original vision of personal computing and the inventions that enabled it: Interactivity, GUIs, Control devices like the mouse & light pens, Networking, and Object-oriented programming to name a few. – The push to move computing from a privileged service to a public good (via timesharing) – The origins of Claude Shannon's information theory & Von Neumann's architecture that laid the groundwork for much of later computing. It's even more special since it also covers the people & the culture that made all this happen. It's special since it covers an amazingly broad scope – all the way from the mechanical machines employed in WW2 (cybernetics) to modern-day personal computing & the internet. This is the most deeply insightful book I've read on the history & vision of computing.
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