Kenneth Hudson pointed out back in 1983 that the industrial archaeology of computers was in danger of not being properly recorded. The producers of this book have taken the argument further. Just collecting examples of old equipment is not enough. A steam train engine looks spectacular, most people can understand the basic operating principles and engineers can still describe the whole process of heat and energy transfer that made steam engines viable. A grey plastic box with minimal moving parts tells you very little. The uses of computers, the programming languages, the operating systems and the application programmes are all part of the story. Back in 1983 the organisation I worked for had just bought a Texas Instruments mini to replace the use of an IBM 360 call up service. Now I could go out and buy software on a CD to do all we did then, and a vast amount more, on the Pentium P5‐100 on which I am word processing this review; even though this machine is five years out of date.
This book covers the wide history of computing. The first two entries are Abacus and Acrobat PDF. There are entries for programs like browsers and cookies, and the workhorse languages like Pascal and FORTRAN. There are entries for people including pre‐electronic pioneers like Blaise Pascal, mathematicians like Mandelbrodt, theorists like Turing and then creators of the Internet Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn. Less tangible objects like interfaces in system architecture and portals in Internet access are discussed. Ethics, crime, and security are all covered. The entries, written by a panel of about 200 authors cover from half to a couple of pages each. They end with some suggestions for further reading, and in the case of articles about people some selected writings. There are 23 pages of index at the end of the second volume and a list of subject headings at the beginning of volume one.
The coverage seems complete. The usual check of articles about things I know something of are complete and those about things I do not know about but are informative is easily passed by this work. As a UK reviewer of a book on computer history with a US publisher I had to check that Colossus was in. It is! I was privileged to see the rebuilt Colossus at Bletchley Park recently. Bletchley also has a museum of computers, which would satisfy Ken Hudson’s original concern. This is a book for any organisation involved in twentieth‐century history. Computers have become so deeply imbedded in culture, in the broadest sense, that the study of the history of then cannot be limited to industrial or technological historians.
