Rating: 6.5/10.
Book about the early history of the computer focused on the Princeton group by George Dyson, the son of physicist Freeman Dyson. The book begins around 1953 when only a few computers were in existence, in the middle of a nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union, and von Neumann gets funding to build a computer for ballistic calculations.
It goes on a detour about the history of the plot of land that’s under the IAS in Princeton, then turns to Veblen, who was recruited to help with ballistics calculations. He recruits a group of mathematicians and gets support to expand the faculty at Princeton and focus on mathematics during the Great Depression.
The next chapter is on John von Neumann, who was born in Hungary to a Jewish banking family and showed mathematical talents from a young age and published many papers regarding the axiomatic foundation of set theory and equilibriums in game theory and many other topics, and was recruited to Veblen’s group in Princeton in 1931, partly to escape the war in Europe, and works on early computers for atomic bomb computations. Von Neumann and the others then build the ENIAC from vacuum tubes since solid state electronics did not exist yet, mainly for atomic bomb calculations, and it had programmable architecture and a small amount of fast memory with potentially unbounded slow memory through punch cards, realizing something similar to the Turing machine.
Overall, this book is mainly about a wide cast of people involved in early computing history around Princeton, with little technical detail. It’s quite meandering, with a lack of much in the way of storytelling or narrative either. I stopped reading after 5 chapters, (about 90 pages into the book).
