Getting the message: a history of communications [Book Review]

The author begins by introducing the 1951 Manchester computer. This computer was built by Ferranti Limited and was known formally as the Ferranti Mark I and informally as the Blue Pig. The author then passes briefly to the present with its proliferation of desktop computers and other devices containing microprocessors made possible by the silicon chip, referred to in this book as “a Blue Pig sitting on something the size of a postage stamp.” A brief historical survey of the origins of the modern computer begins in Chapter 5 and emphasizes the contemporary pressures influencing developments. This includes Babbage and the need for accurate navigation tables, Hollerith and the requirements of the US census, Zuse and support from the National Aeronautical Lab in Germany, Aiken and support from the US Navy beginning in the 1930s, and Eckert and Mauchly and the need for firing tables during World War II. Approximately half of the book is taken up with a discussion of the life and work of Alan Turing. As the subtitle “The Making of the Modern Computer” will suggest, this is a book about the development of the computer and the applications that encouraged its development. Programming languages and software are scarcely mentioned. There are several black-and-white photos of early computers, the familiar engraving of a young Babbage, a photograph of Turing, and a three-page box giving Cantor’s diagonal argument on the existence of irrational numbers. The three-page bibliography will be helpful to those readers wishing more detailed technical accounts of the development of the computer and the social and economic consequences. There is no index and it does not seem necessary. Turing and the Universal Machine provides a wellwritten and informal introduction to the origins of the electronic computer, albeit from a British viewpoint, and should be welcomed by computer scientists, students, and the general reader. Keith Smillie University of Alberta smillie@cs.ualberta.ca