A HISTORY OF MODERN COMPUTING.
By Paul E.Ceruzzi.
MIT Press; 408 pages; $35 and £24.95
NERDS 2.0.1: A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE INTERNET.
By Stephen Segaller.
TV Books; 402 pages; $27.50
SPARE a thought for the computer historian. Most subjects ebb and flow, rise and fall, leaving the tracings on which history's tales are told. But computing just seems to explode. Who cares, in mid-blast, how the bomb was made? At the end of his excellent history of the computer, Paul Ceruzzi suddenly arrives at the same realisation. The Internet boom has seemingly eclipsed all the computing that came before it. Perhaps, he muses, that day in 1994 when Netscape went public and doubled its worth overnight, sparking the “dot.com” euphoria that still drives much of the American stock market boom today, marked the real beginning of computing history. Perhaps everything that went before—his whole book, in other words—was just “prelude”. Has he written a history of the internal combustion engine when he should have done the car?
Probably. Such are the perils of chronicling an industry that runs on “Internet time”, where every year brings the mythical seven years worth of change. But for those who care about engines—or in this case core memory, time-sharing operating systems and the rise and fall of companies that few now remember—this book is a gem. It focuses mostly on the period from 1945 to 1982, which goes from the invention of the electronic computer for trajectory analysis in wartime to the introduction of the IBM PC and the bringing of computing to the masses. This is a story of heroic engineering, commercial decisions both wise and deranged, and the geeky passions of those in a technology underground who for the most part had no idea that they were inventing something that would some day touch nearly everyone.
Mr Ceruzzi takes a more academic approach than Tracy Kidder did in “The Soul of a New Machine”, in which her fly-on-the-wall reportage helped to capture the rollercoaster ride of technology creation. Mr Ceruzzis's is a history of how the general-purpose register came to be and who decided whether to use the forward or backward slash in directories. But it is in such arcana that a miracle, to say nothing of one of the world's largest industries, came to be. And fortunately Mr Ceruzzi leavens the technology with plenty of fascinating anecdote.
One learns, for instance, that the term “computer architecture” comes from the days when computing was done by a room-full of women with mechanical calculators, and the desks had to be arranged in a certain configuration to keep the work flow running smoothly. Ronald Reagan, then a GE spokesman, touted the first cheque-reading computer, and with it the distinctive computer lettering that defined an age (and is still found on cheques today). One of the engineers who worked on that computer was Arnold Spielberg, father of Steven. And interactive computing owes its start to the Mercury space programme, which was the first to require a real-time computing process that could be interrupted if life-threatening events occurred.
As tough as Mr Ceruzzi's job is, Stephen Segaller, author of “Nerds 2.0.1: A Brief History of the Internet”, has it worse. At least computers today still bear traces of their ancestry. The Internet's forebears are invisible to the average user. The silicon heroes of “Nerds” are “Interface Message Processors”, specialised computers developed in 1969 to connect American military computers. They allowed computers of all sorts to talk to each other, even over telephone lines. They introduced, almost by accident, most of the concepts that now define the basic Internet protocols, and it is only because they worked that everything else that makes up the Internet today was layered on top. But it is hard to get very excited about them, despite Mr Segaller's entertaining writing (the book is the basis of a television series of the same name).
The reason is that, unlike the computer itself, the Internet is not so much a technology as an idea riding on the back of other technologies. Once out there, the notion of connecting computers over telephone lines was so powerful that it took on a life of its own, spurring applications such as e-mail and other would-be social revolutions. The real technical advances came in computers, data networks and software, little of which was specifically intended for the Internet itself until recently. As a result, Mr Segaller ends up spending more than half of his book retelling the familiar history of the personal computer and networking industry, which was the subject of his previous book and television series, “Triumph of the Nerds”.
That is a great tale, and Mr Segaller tells it well. But you cannot help wishing it were a more cohesive history of the Internet itself, without all the Silicon Valley tangents. The problem is that it is simply too soon to write that book. Technically, the Internet is almost 30 years old. But for the first 20 years of that it was an obscure and relatively unimpressive domain of academics and computer-science professionals. As a cultural and business phenomenon, it is less than five years old—too young to say what mattered and what did not. As Mr Ceruzzi puts it, in describing the danger of writing about technology while it is still white-hot, “What would readers think of a history that ended with the statement that the culmination of all computing was Gopher?” Don't get the reference to one of the main Internet standards of just seven years ago? That is just the point.
This article appeared in the Review section of the print edition under the headline "Nerds’ triumph"
From the June 19th 1999 edition
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