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frudzicz's review against another edition
2.0
The book ends with the quote "There must be something about this code that you haven't explained yet", from Theodor W Lancaster to Mr Barricelli. Coincidentally, that's how I feel about the book as a whole. It seems that there was very little information in it except regarding the arrangement and composition of buildings, and rooms within those buildings.
cjgo's review against another edition
DNF
Got about halfway through and want to come back and revisit. Big fan of Maniac which is what led me here however I felt I was lost at times. I just don’t have to the patience for it at the moment, and will come back.
Got about halfway through and want to come back and revisit. Big fan of Maniac which is what led me here however I felt I was lost at times. I just don’t have to the patience for it at the moment, and will come back.
bupdaddy's review against another edition
3.0
Pretty interesting book about the first computers and the people who built them, and what problems they were first used for.
josh_paul's review against another edition
4.0
The points made in the 1 and 2-star reviews of this book are largely accurate:
1) Dyson includes a history of the Princeton, NJ area going back to pre-Columbian times, which has no clear direct relevance to the main topic of the book.
2) The book is highly digressive, occasionally wandering off into discussions of the author's own crackpot hypotheses. Personally, I found a lot of these interesting, but I could see getting irritated if you were looking for a straightforward history.
3) He probably gets some technical points about computer architecture wrong.
4) Some folks criticized the book because he spends a lot of time focused on John von Neumann. While it's true that he spends a lot of time talking about von Neumann, criticizing him for that is a bit like criticizing a book on evolution for focusing heavily on Darwin.
Whatever the book's flaws though, I believe Dyson did a great job of weaving together several stories that are often told separately, namely those of the Manhattan Project, the first digital computers, the early development of game theory, and evolutionary biology. Computers are at the center of this, but I took a big part of Dyson's point to be that you can't talk about early computing without talking about those other fields.
Since Dyson, presumably, wanted to keep the book under 250,000 pages he inevitably left out or glossed over some of the finer points, but that's a strategic choice, not a bug.
1) Dyson includes a history of the Princeton, NJ area going back to pre-Columbian times, which has no clear direct relevance to the main topic of the book.
2) The book is highly digressive, occasionally wandering off into discussions of the author's own crackpot hypotheses. Personally, I found a lot of these interesting, but I could see getting irritated if you were looking for a straightforward history.
3) He probably gets some technical points about computer architecture wrong.
4) Some folks criticized the book because he spends a lot of time focused on John von Neumann. While it's true that he spends a lot of time talking about von Neumann, criticizing him for that is a bit like criticizing a book on evolution for focusing heavily on Darwin.
Whatever the book's flaws though, I believe Dyson did a great job of weaving together several stories that are often told separately, namely those of the Manhattan Project, the first digital computers, the early development of game theory, and evolutionary biology. Computers are at the center of this, but I took a big part of Dyson's point to be that you can't talk about early computing without talking about those other fields.
Since Dyson, presumably, wanted to keep the book under 250,000 pages he inevitably left out or glossed over some of the finer points, but that's a strategic choice, not a bug.
kathrinpassig's review against another edition
3.0
"So mittelmäßig, aber trotzdem interessant", lautete die Empfehlung von Franz Scherer, und so war es dann auch. Über fehlende technische Detailkenntnis wird stellenweise hinwegimprovisiert, die Zusammenhänge bleiben oft rätselhaft, aber es sind viele gute Stellen drin, und immerhin interessiert sich hier mal jemand für abstrakte Konzepte und nicht nur für eine Aufzählung von Hardwareerfindungen.
davidsteinsaltz's review against another edition
4.0
I guess Turing's name sells more books than von Neumann, which is who the book is really about. Still, it's a fascinating look at a crucial time in the development of the modern world, when bombs, Boole, and biology came together.
iacobus's review against another edition
2.0
I have complicated thoughts about this book. I want to like it, but so much of it was not something I wanted.
First, as a history of IAS, von Neumann, the atomic bomb and early computing, I enjoyed the book throughly. It was definitely disjointed and many times wrong or very vague (as other reviewers point out). I don't think Dyson fully understood a lot of the tech that he was trying to write and ended up just blowing that task. But as a biography and the parts about people were more than a good balance.
That said, from the mid point about the hydrogen bomb on, the book goes down a crazy rabbit hole. At one point, in all honesty, Dyson attempts to argue that digital things, like the Internet, are a form of ET style alien life. Computer programs, from Google to Angry Birds, are sentient living and conscious organisms. It was like reading the writings of an insane person.
My take away: read the first half and stop at the h bomb.
First, as a history of IAS, von Neumann, the atomic bomb and early computing, I enjoyed the book throughly. It was definitely disjointed and many times wrong or very vague (as other reviewers point out). I don't think Dyson fully understood a lot of the tech that he was trying to write and ended up just blowing that task. But as a biography and the parts about people were more than a good balance.
That said, from the mid point about the hydrogen bomb on, the book goes down a crazy rabbit hole. At one point, in all honesty, Dyson attempts to argue that digital things, like the Internet, are a form of ET style alien life. Computer programs, from Google to Angry Birds, are sentient living and conscious organisms. It was like reading the writings of an insane person.
My take away: read the first half and stop at the h bomb.
blackoxford's review against another edition
4.0
Knowledge To Kill For
This is not your average paean to the pioneers of the high-tech industry. Who knew, for example, that Turing’s insight had to overcome two centuries of mathematical obsession with Newton’s (but not Leibniz's) infinitesimal calculus? And who knew that the development of the first digital computers was triggered by the military drive to create the hydrogen bomb? And who knew that the victory of binary arithmetic would be ensured by molecular biology? Certainly not me, and I suspect a number of other ignorant sods who presumed that this industry ‘just happened’, like milk suddenly appearing on the supermarket shelves with no clue about its origins in muck and mud.
Dyson, a son of the manse so to speak (son of Freeman Dyson, brother of Esther Dyson, and the grandson of Sir George Dyson), can be as concise as he is illuminating: “Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA.” When these events are considered together rather than as independent strands of modern science, it becomes clear that nothing in our lives almost 70 years later is unconnected to war and the organisation for war provoked directly by the Second World War (and indirectly by the First). The American President Eisenhower’s concerns about the ‘military-industrial complex’ were proven justified not just about the defence industry but also about a new global society built upon inherently lethal knowledge.
The sources of this lethal knowledge were places like the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, the Los Alamos compound in New Mexico, and the Institute for Advanced Research In Princeton, New Jersey. These were modern monastic establishments whose existence was justified not by prayer but by thought, largely mathematical, and not by the construction of physical edifices but the creation of weapons of destruction. These were the forerunners of what would later be known as ‘think tanks’ and ‘skunk works,’ organisational entities devoted exclusively neither to economic success nor industrial productivity but technological innovation that would facilitate mass killing.
These new centres of thought were not isolated academic enclaves. They did assemble and concentrate the best intellects and coordinated their collective efforts in highly abstruse areas. But they also set agendas for university (and even high school) scientific education, successfully lobbied government about the priorities for military research spending, and shaped the interests of the most important private foundations that funded research from medicine to astrophysics.
Because they had no factories, no significant labour force, and no immediately commercial products, these establishments engaged in a sort of parallel politics. Although they were the driving force of the new military industrial complex, they were functionally invisible, in part because their work was confidential, but mostly because no one outside them could really understand what they were up to. They effectively constituted an independent empire of the mind, a Platonic haven of pure rationality, or at least what military requirements implied as rationality.
Most of the men (and they were almost all men) recruited into these establishments as thinkers or administrators were undoubtedly exceptionally clever in their respective fields. However, it is clear from the personal and institutional biographical detail which Dyson provides that very few of them would have achieved their ‘potential’ without this new form of scientific organisation. It is likely that they would have spent their lives in interesting but inconclusive research in dispersed academic institutions, or teaching Latin to high school seniors. The legendary names - Shannon, von Neumann, Ashby, Wiener, Mandelbrot, etc - would probably have been known but not with anything like the cultural force that they now have. These new organisations were intellectual king-makers.
So these military/intellectual enterprises, dedicated to refining the efficiency of human conflict, have transformed scientific culture. The concentration of intellectual talent, money and professional dominance means that there is only one path to scientific innovation - national defence, however widely that might be defined. Subsequent commercialisation, organised on similar lines in the Silicon Valleys and University Science Parks of the world, are functional subsidiaries of an invisible network, which few of us know anything about except when some ‘breakthrough’ (or breakdown) is announced in Wired or featured in Fast Company.
My lifetime is almost exactly contemporaneous with the digital epoch (Von Neumann died on my 10th birthday; Steve Jobs had just turned 2; Gates had just begun to walk). The presumptions, intentions, and fallacies of this epoch are things I share intellectually and emotionally with my generational cohort. This is Turing’s Cathedral, a cultural state of mind rather than a physical edifice. It took substantially less time to build than its medieval version. But its cultural influence is at least as great. Whether it will maintain itself as durably or with continued centrality is an open question, the answer to which seems to depend upon our fundamental but repressed attitude toward the god of war.
This is not your average paean to the pioneers of the high-tech industry. Who knew, for example, that Turing’s insight had to overcome two centuries of mathematical obsession with Newton’s (but not Leibniz's) infinitesimal calculus? And who knew that the development of the first digital computers was triggered by the military drive to create the hydrogen bomb? And who knew that the victory of binary arithmetic would be ensured by molecular biology? Certainly not me, and I suspect a number of other ignorant sods who presumed that this industry ‘just happened’, like milk suddenly appearing on the supermarket shelves with no clue about its origins in muck and mud.
Dyson, a son of the manse so to speak (son of Freeman Dyson, brother of Esther Dyson, and the grandson of Sir George Dyson), can be as concise as he is illuminating: “Three technological revolutions dawned in 1953: thermonuclear weapons, stored-program computers, and the elucidation of how life stores its own instructions as strings of DNA.” When these events are considered together rather than as independent strands of modern science, it becomes clear that nothing in our lives almost 70 years later is unconnected to war and the organisation for war provoked directly by the Second World War (and indirectly by the First). The American President Eisenhower’s concerns about the ‘military-industrial complex’ were proven justified not just about the defence industry but also about a new global society built upon inherently lethal knowledge.
The sources of this lethal knowledge were places like the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in Maryland, the Los Alamos compound in New Mexico, and the Institute for Advanced Research In Princeton, New Jersey. These were modern monastic establishments whose existence was justified not by prayer but by thought, largely mathematical, and not by the construction of physical edifices but the creation of weapons of destruction. These were the forerunners of what would later be known as ‘think tanks’ and ‘skunk works,’ organisational entities devoted exclusively neither to economic success nor industrial productivity but technological innovation that would facilitate mass killing.
These new centres of thought were not isolated academic enclaves. They did assemble and concentrate the best intellects and coordinated their collective efforts in highly abstruse areas. But they also set agendas for university (and even high school) scientific education, successfully lobbied government about the priorities for military research spending, and shaped the interests of the most important private foundations that funded research from medicine to astrophysics.
Because they had no factories, no significant labour force, and no immediately commercial products, these establishments engaged in a sort of parallel politics. Although they were the driving force of the new military industrial complex, they were functionally invisible, in part because their work was confidential, but mostly because no one outside them could really understand what they were up to. They effectively constituted an independent empire of the mind, a Platonic haven of pure rationality, or at least what military requirements implied as rationality.
Most of the men (and they were almost all men) recruited into these establishments as thinkers or administrators were undoubtedly exceptionally clever in their respective fields. However, it is clear from the personal and institutional biographical detail which Dyson provides that very few of them would have achieved their ‘potential’ without this new form of scientific organisation. It is likely that they would have spent their lives in interesting but inconclusive research in dispersed academic institutions, or teaching Latin to high school seniors. The legendary names - Shannon, von Neumann, Ashby, Wiener, Mandelbrot, etc - would probably have been known but not with anything like the cultural force that they now have. These new organisations were intellectual king-makers.
So these military/intellectual enterprises, dedicated to refining the efficiency of human conflict, have transformed scientific culture. The concentration of intellectual talent, money and professional dominance means that there is only one path to scientific innovation - national defence, however widely that might be defined. Subsequent commercialisation, organised on similar lines in the Silicon Valleys and University Science Parks of the world, are functional subsidiaries of an invisible network, which few of us know anything about except when some ‘breakthrough’ (or breakdown) is announced in Wired or featured in Fast Company.
My lifetime is almost exactly contemporaneous with the digital epoch (Von Neumann died on my 10th birthday; Steve Jobs had just turned 2; Gates had just begun to walk). The presumptions, intentions, and fallacies of this epoch are things I share intellectually and emotionally with my generational cohort. This is Turing’s Cathedral, a cultural state of mind rather than a physical edifice. It took substantially less time to build than its medieval version. But its cultural influence is at least as great. Whether it will maintain itself as durably or with continued centrality is an open question, the answer to which seems to depend upon our fundamental but repressed attitude toward the god of war.
thomcote's review against another edition
2.0
The historical portions are semi-interesting, if a bit dry, but as others have pointed out in the reviews it's apparent that Dyson doesn't really understand that much about how computers actually work, and definitely is not able to make it clear in this book.
It's clear he's more interested in speculating about the future of artificial intelligence and how technology and biology interact. All well and good, and he does connect it to some speculations made by Von Neumann and others. But Dyson frequently veers off into "are we using the computers or are they using us"-type hypotheticals where he compares the Internet and neural nets to biological beings with will instead of the very human-dependent systems held together by duct tape that they are. These sections of the book gave me a strong sense that Dyson is very passionate about technology but has rarely if ever actually worked with computers at a systems level.
I also felt Dyson needed to better address the fact that the early computers he writes about were built in large part for military purposes, particularly the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Maybe because his father was Freeman Dyson and he knew some of the subjects of the book personally, or for some other reason, he rarely engages with the role the IAS computers and the people who worked on them had in the perpetration of the two largest war crimes in history and the subsequent half century of cold war. I would say there are (must be) books with more objective and knowledgeable histories of the computer.
It's clear he's more interested in speculating about the future of artificial intelligence and how technology and biology interact. All well and good, and he does connect it to some speculations made by Von Neumann and others. But Dyson frequently veers off into "are we using the computers or are they using us"-type hypotheticals where he compares the Internet and neural nets to biological beings with will instead of the very human-dependent systems held together by duct tape that they are. These sections of the book gave me a strong sense that Dyson is very passionate about technology but has rarely if ever actually worked with computers at a systems level.
I also felt Dyson needed to better address the fact that the early computers he writes about were built in large part for military purposes, particularly the development of the atomic and hydrogen bombs. Maybe because his father was Freeman Dyson and he knew some of the subjects of the book personally, or for some other reason, he rarely engages with the role the IAS computers and the people who worked on them had in the perpetration of the two largest war crimes in history and the subsequent half century of cold war. I would say there are (must be) books with more objective and knowledgeable histories of the computer.