A New History of Modern Computing - An Important Book for Fans of Computing

I've read and very much enjoyed the book "A New History of Modern Computing" by Thomas Haigh and Paul E. Ceruzzi.  I've completed the book and I thought I should post a review and let readers know what they could expect from the book.  The contents of the book is copyrighted and is not one of the books that MIT press publishes online, but the price is reasonable.  A free sample is available on Kindle.

In addition to reading the free sample, you can get a bit more of the flavor of the book by reading the paper "Finding a Story for the History of Computing".  This idea of having a story to tell, or even better multiple stories to tell is quite compelling.  The book unfolds as a series of developments from the various users points of view, scientific computing, business computing, home computing, etc, as well as the more typical stories of the people who designed the machines and the chronology of developments.

The early parts of this book filled in many knowledge gaps for me, not just isolated facts but also connections between the history of the concepts and their current use.  As an example, the fact that pipelining and hardware parallelism were originally features of mainframes before they "trickled down" to workstation computers and PCs.  Of course it makes sense but because I had no exposure too mainframes, and little too workstations, I did not know this.  For me, the earlier parts of the book were both interesting and informative.

Once the books's history moves into the Home Computer and Personal Computer revolution, nostalgia will kick in, depending on your age, that may happen at different points in the timeline, but there is good coverage from a wide range of developments.  There are a couple of nostalgic games that one naturally plays when reading the book, answering these questions:

The first computer mentioned in the book that you ever used:
Apple II, Page 181.

The first programming language that you ever used:
Microsoft BASIC, Page 171

The first computer in the book that you had at home:
Commodore VIC-20, Page 196

And of course the lists of computers that you've every owned or worked on.  If you are a computer collector, then of course you'll be interested in reading about the computers that you currently have in your collection.

But as the book moves into modern times the tone of the book shifts.  Or perhaps it's just my response to the nature of the stories.  The book explains well the rise of the smartphone and AI, the idea that software is everywhere and that it is a universal solvent that dissolves everything (for example, the iPhone replacing: alarm clocks, maps, land line telephones, mail, TV, etc, etc),  This point of view is quite interesting.  As an example, when I look back at videos and lectures from as recent as 2014, I notice that the dominance of Intel is still assumed, but I'm writing this bLog article on an ARM powered Apple M1 machine, the fastest computer I've ever owned.  Apple has made three hardware architecture changes in the lifespan of the Macintosh and this last one has been by far the least painful, almost un-noticeable, and again this is arguably because of how good of a job Apple has done on the software emulation layer that's used to bridge the gap between old software and this new hardware.

I believe that the paradigm that the authors suggest is a very helpful one as we consider the future of computing.  It challenges us to try to decide what is the best kind of life that we can live, and how computing fits into that life given its ubiquity.  I came to the end of the book with more serious questions than answers, but perhaps this is fitting for those of us who work in the tech world and have a disproportionate impact and a therefore a responsibility to our fellow human beings.  

Technology is not inherently good or evil.  These are tools that we as individual human beings wield.  To the extent that we each understand how to use these tools we bear the responsibility to use them well.  My kids will tell you that they get sick of hearing this, but Uncle Ben (Or Aunt May, depending on your age) was right when he/she told Peter Parker that with great power comes great responsibility.

If you want a book that will make you think, I recommend "A New History of Modern Computing".