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This is a great book. Surprisingly interesting.

While the subject matter is not a new thing to me - far from it - the way the author goes about telling the story of how modern computers came to life is exciting, engaging and fun. He starts with morse and braille, talks about the principles of mathematics and information, explains the critical concept of switches, and finally moves into the world of circuit boards and binary data, cultimating in ALU. After that, he discusses the idea of analytical and computational engines and machines developed through the late 19th and early 20th century, before we finally start seeing the modern computer around 1940s, with Turing and von Neumann laying down the foundations of what we know and use today.

The book is really cool because it's also a nostalgic trip down the memory lane. Charles mentions the famous Bell Labs, the legendary Shannon, Ritchie, Noyce, Moore, UNIX, C language, and other people and concepts without which we would not be sitting here, writing reviews on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ. Or we might, but the fundamentals of the computing devices would be completely different.

Computers sound like magic, but the thing is, they are a culmination of 150 years of electric progress, 200 years of data/information progress, and about 350 years of math progress. The first boards, the first programs, the first assembler and the first compiler, they were all written by hand. Control signals are still essentially the same, and if you look at a typical x86 Intel processor, the legacy support for machine instructions goes back to the first microprocessor. The problem is, when you condense the centuries of hard work into a cool, whirring appliance, it does feel like magic.

The author wrote the book in the late 80s and then revised it in the late 90s, so some of the stuff may look quaint to us, like the mention of floppy disks, VGA displays and such. But then he also shows uncanny foresight around overall information exchange, because the information principles are universal, and he correctly predicted that Moore's Law would taper out around 2015.

He also cheated a little.

He described the flip-flop as a perpetuum mobile, which can be sort of excused, and he also skimmed on the concepts of oscillators, transistors (and did not mention capacitors), but then those are fairly complex, and I guess it's not really possible to do that without going deep into the fields of physics and electric engineering. Excusable, because the book is compelling and delightful.

Even if you have a PhD in Physics from a top university or have done computer science all your life, you can rap in ASM and name all LoTR characters by heart, this is still a good read. Do not feel like you'd be highschooling yourself with silly analogies. Far from it. This is a splendid combo of history, technology, mathematics, information, and nostalgia.

Highly recommended,
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