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4 stars.

A great read if society collapses and you need to accelerate the rebuild of modern computing from scratch! Sort of like Connecticut Yannkee in King Arthur’s Court, but for IBM.

Petzold goes all the way back to morse code and telegraph relays in order to methodically build up a step-by-step mental model of modern day computing.

For techies: this is a fun and fast read that will “fill in a lot of gaps�� and give you a clean narrative from atoms to the world of bits. It goes a few abstraction layers deeper than the typical university computer science curriculum, which tend to pick up with vonNeumann architectures but gloss over the century of transistors and relays that got us there. (that's how I first found it!)

For non-techies: this is a fun but challenging read that will make you more conversant in the foundations of computing and how the 20th century came to be. It has a lot more rigor than your typical pop sci novel, but rewarding to get through.


Narrative arc:
He walks us through the parallel advancements in hardware:
- gates
- relays (esp: telegraph relays)
- vacuum tubes
- transistors (the most important invention of 20th century)
- microprocessors

and software:
- morse code
- binary
- boolean logic
- turing machines
- von neumann architectures
- operating systems
- higher order languages

Along the way you conceptually learn how to build a vonNeumann machine from scratch, including deep technical detail into how to program binary adders and memory registers, etc.