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prophets This page, currently under development, highlights some of the writing about 'pre-digital' computing. There's a useful overview in Computer: A History of the Information Machine (New York, Basic Books 96) by William Aspray & Martin Campbell-Kelly.      Turing The best biography of pioneer Alan Turing remains the quirky Alan Turing: The Enigma (New York, Simon & Schuster 83) by Alan Hodges.   Hodges has a rich but somewhat polemical Turing site; there's a short biography on John Kowalik's site.      Von Neumann John von Neumann's most rounded biography is by Norman Macrae in John von Neumann (New York, Pantheon 92).  Prisoner's Dilemma: John von Neumann, Game Theory & the Puzzle of the Bomb (New York, Doubleday 93) by William Poundstone concentrates on game theory - disappointingly thin - and the Hungarian wizard's relations with the Los Alamos boys. William Aspray's John Von Neumann & The Origins Of Modern Computing (Cambridge, MIT 90) is a serviceable study of involvement with early electronic computation. Aspray co-edited Papers of John von Neumann on Computing & Computer Theory (Cambridge, MIT 87), which includes a comprehensive bibliography.  Scott McCartney offers a revisionist account of von Neumann, Eckert & Mauchly in ENIAC: The Triumphs and Tragedies of the World's First Computer (New York, Walker 99). Alice & Arthur Burks' The First Electronic Computer: The Atanasoff Story (Ann Arbor, Uni of Michigan Press 88) is a more standard rendition in line with Nancy Stern's From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers (Bedford, Digital Press 81) and Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer (Bedford, Digital Press 80) by Kent Redmond & Thomas Smith.  The US cybernetics movement is explored in Steve Heims' The Cybernetics Group (Cambridge, MIT Press 91) - strong on social theory - and The Closed World: Computers & the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America (Cambridge, MIT Press 97) by Paul Edwards. Heims' John von Neumann & Norbert Wiener: From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life & Death (Cambridge, MIT Press 80) is also commended.  Despite its title, the Edwards book is an outstanding study of US government thinking about (and funding of) information technology from the fifties to the 1980s, including the ARPANET.  Not an easy read but replete with insights about the machinery and mindset that gave birth to the Net.   A perspective on that mindset is provided by the acerbic Paul Strassman in The Squandered Computer (New Canaan, Information Economics Press 97), exploring why many of the promises of IT have not been fulfilled.      Bush WASP savant and computer pioneer Vannevar Bush was profiled in a 1998 Wired. His 1945 As We May Think Atlantic Monthly essay prefiguring aspects of the Web is available online and was the subject of an excellent 1995 MIT conference.   Among biographies we recommend Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century (New York, Free Press 97) by Pascal Zachary and the more technical From Memex to Hypertext: Vannevar Bush & the Mind's Machine (New York, Academic Press 92) edited by James Nyce & Paul Kahn.   His guarded autobiography, Pieces of the Action, was published in 1970.  Apart from hype over his role as a 'prophet' of the Internet (like that regarding Charles Babbage, largely misplaced), Bush is gaining greater recognition - along with colleague James Conant - of one of the 40's and 50's 'wise men' of science, with a finger in every pie from the Manhattan Project and Operation Paperclip through to standardized testing for university entrance.      Babbage Charles Babbage, despite recent hype, is at best a great uncle rather than a grandfather of the net. Michael Lindgren's Glory & Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Muller, Charles Babbage and Georg & Edvard Scheutz (Cambridge, MIT Press 90) is a detailed study of early mechanical computing.  Herman Goldstine's The Computer: From Pascal to von Neumann (Princeton, Princeton Uni Press 72) and Paul Ceruzzi's Reckoners: the Prehistory of the Digital Computer, from relays to the stored program concept, 1935-1945 (Westport, Greenwood 83) have a wider view. The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage & the Quest To Build The First Computer (London, Little Brown 00) by Doron Swade is a dual account of the man and modern reconstruction of his machines at the UK Science Museum; we'd have preferred more coverage of Babbage and less of Swade.  There's a more detailed study of Babbage's career in Anthony Hyman's Charles Babbage: Pioneer of the Computer (Oxford, Oxford Uni Press 84). Hyman edited Science & Reform: Selected Works of Charles Babbage (Cambridge, Cambridge Uni Press 89).  Cultural Babbage: Technology, Time & Invention (London, Faber 98) edited by Francis Spufford & Jenny Uglow is a collection of essays inspired by Charles Babbage's Difference Engine.    next page  (IBM)