Coalescent

I've just finished reading Electronic Brains, a book by Mike Hally about the development of the first computers. It's a bookalisation [1] of a short series that ran on Radio 4 a couple of years ago; I didn't hear it at the time, but it looks like it's possible to listen to the whole thing here.

If the series is as enjoyable as the book, it's worth a listen. Like Francis Spufford's The Backroom Boys, Electronic Brains picks out human stories from technological innovations, in this case united by time-frame (roughly 1940 to 1960) rather than nationality. Hally doesn't quite have Spufford's gift for dramatisation--there's nothing quite as heartwarming as the cheers of the British Interplanetary Society--but most of the stories are interesting, and some are more memorable than that.

American, Russian, British and Australian computers are covered, of a wide variety of designs and capabilities. The most colourful, literally, is MONIAC, built by Bill Phillips in about 1950, and used to demonstrate the principles of economics to students at the LSE. It was designed around hydraulics rather than electronics; the flow of money is represented by the flow of coloured water. Elsewhere, the Russian engineers are typically pragmatic; one recalls that 'it was very hot in the computer room, so we needed some cooling. We demolished one wall to make the room bigger, but that wasn't enough, so then we took the roof off as well.' You sort of hope he really does mean the roof, rather than the ceiling. And the final chapter, which documents IBM's rise to dominance of the field, made particularly interesting reading in light of the news that IBM is now selling its PC division.

Electronic Brains is light on engineering detail; it's not the book to read if you want to know how the first computers worked. Instead, it tells you how they came about, and why, and in doing so gives an interesting snapshot of the dawn of the information age.

[1] Well, it's not a novel, is it?