The History of the Computer

 
 
The History of the Computer

People, Inventions, and Technology that Changed Our World

by Rachel Ignotofsky
Ten Speed Books

2022

 

 

I really like Rachel Ignotofsky's art, and her illustrated non-fiction, aimed at middle-grade and young adult readers, seems well-balanced to me. She provides a broad introduction with just enough detail to get you started, and hopefully inspire you to seek out more information about the parts that interest you most. Her writing is clear and accessible, without seeming to over-simplify or dumb anything down. The experience of reading her books is a lot like visiting a good museum - it provides a good overview and probably whets your appetite to learn more.
 
In The History of the Computer, Ignotofsky shows us advances in calculating and computing devices, and in the advances in human knowledge and understanding - including math and information theory - that allow us to invent and then build new devices.
 
As in The Wondrous Workings of Planet Earth which I read previously, Ignotofsky starts with an overview that defines key hardware and software terms, explains the basics of how binary logic works, and then shows timelines of important on/off switches, storage mediums, video games, and robots. We get a couple chapters about precursors to the modern computer, including numbers and the abacus in the more distant past, and Boolean logic and mechanical calculators during the industrial revolution. The first 'computers' were human workers who could devise and then solve math equations for governments and businesses, so that others could simply look up the answers on a printed table. (The conversion tables in every school notebook, showing how to switch from Standard to Metric would be like the simplest version of this.)
 
We join the 20th century as new electronic computers were invented and immediately put to work in World War II, breaking codes and calculating missile trajectories. After WWII, the American government continued funding computer research as part of the space race. Initially, the only computers were housed in government agencies, prestigious universities, and large corporations, but over time they proliferated.

 
In this and every subsequent period, the sorts of advances we see are switches and memory storage getting smaller and more electronic; truly exceptional thinkers creating new programming languages and user-interfaces (including graphical and tactile interfaces) that make computers easier for everyone else to use; and new applications, previously only theorized, becoming feasible because of the increased speed, enlarged memory, and greater accessibility those innovations provided. For virtually anything you can think to do do with computers, someone was theorizing it and someone else trying to build it much earlier than you probably think.
 
In the 1970s, new inventors working outside of the big businesses that manufactured room-sized mainframes and refrigerator-sized 'mini-computers' began to build much smaller devices for small businesses and households - the 'micro-computer' or personal computer desktop. In the 1980s, artists and other creative people used computers to make their work, leading to a flourishing of computer animation, electronic music, and video games.
 
In the 1990s, existing government, business, and academic computer networks were combined to make the hardware of the internet, and the software protocols of the web made it possible for the public to get online. In the 2000s, computer components were finally small enough to combine multiple devices and still be small enough to fit in someone's hand - the 'all-in-one device' or smatphone.
 
At the end, when she talks about the newest inventions that might drive the next stage of computing, Ignotofsky singles out self-driving cars, cryptocurrency, artificial intelligence (by which she means Machine Learning, since ChatGPT and genAI didn't exist yet), smart homes and internet-of-things, and using Big Data in science.
 
Ignotofsky gives attention both to 'firsts' and to iterations on an idea that lead up to its most famous form. She provides us with the names and a bit of biographical detail for lots and lots of thinkers and workers. You can't read this book and come away thinking that a handful of geniuses did everything themselves, and you probably notice that the people who got famous are not necessarily smarter or more creative than the ones who didn't. Fame seems to follow money, which comes from making the first really commercially successful version of something - which is not the same as having the idea, making and of the prototypes or intermediate steps, or even actually being the first one to sell it. Fame and success are both fickle, and it took a lot of other people doing less-noticed work to make each Jobs or Gates or Zuckerberg possible.
 
I mentioned I like Ignotofsky's illustration style, and it seems especially suited to kid-friendly technical drawings. She draws outlines that are filled in with block colors, but crucially, the outlines aren't just black, they're in color too, which provides an awful lot of extra information. Her drawings of the old mechanical calculators, the early computers likes ENIAC and UNIVAC, and the prototype quantum computer are especially good looking, possibly because they have a lot of visible parts. Every improvement makes the parts smaller and the connections harder to see, which is aesthetically a bit of a shame, but Ignotofsky also shows us all the many housings and cases computers came in too.