Bright Boys (review)

Bright Boys is nominally about the men, led by young engineers Jay Forester and Robert Everett, who created the Whirlwind computer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the mid to late 1940s and the impact they and their work had on the greater world of computing. It is a fascinating and easy read, and the photographs on the dust cover and throughout the book are used with excellent effect and add to the reader's feel for the time and place.

Despite its nominal topic, the book goes well beyond describing the Whirlwind creators. It describes the MIT environment that fostered innovation and the Barta Building at MIT in which Whirlwind was created. It explicitly covers the story from 1938 to 1958 of the computer technology development at MIT and within the US Defense Department (particularly the Air Force) and how the Cold War and other pressures encouraged the development of command and control (rather than strictly numerical calculation) computers. It touches on various of the "accretion of events . . . at once political, military, scientific, technological, and socioeconomic, that begat its very own culture . . . [and] spawned a revolution in engineering."

However, the book left me a little unfulfilled, mostly due to my mental difficulty in fitting the book into typical forms of technology history. It is not a traditional scholarly history; the authorial voice is too chatty with too many references to nearly unrelated events—I assume for popular effect—and there is little or no historiographical discussion.

It doesn't tell the story of one institution as does Michael Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning: XEROX PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (HarperCollins Publishers, 2000). It does not focus in as much detail on one man as do Thierry Bardini's Bootstrappting: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Sanford Univ. Press, 2000) and M. Mitchell Waldrop's The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computers Personal (Viking Adult, 2001). And it tells a story well beyond one small team working on one focused project, such as in Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine (Back Bay Books, 2000).

Tom Green is telling a considerably less manageable story, and he makes some pretty broad (explicit and implicit) assertions about the crucially central place of his "bright boys" in the creation of the computer industry we know today. Indeed, his definition of the bright boys seems quite ambiguous. Early on, the bright boys are Forester, Everett, and the people around them relevant to the Whirlwind project. Later, the bright boys seem to extend to a broad world of people who made contributions to the world of computing up into the Internet era. Green uses "bright boys" as almost a pronoun standing for any of the numerous people or groups of people he is describing.

Green also seems to be trying to force a cause-and-effect thread of his bright boys onto a long and broad history of computer technology developments, although he even seems a little ambivalent about this himself. For instance, the book has no subtitle on the cover page—just Bright Boys. However, on the front flap of the dust cover and the book's website, there is a subtitle: "1938-1958: Two Decades That Changed Everything."

Big changes in technology and its applications are complicated and involve a vast number of not necessarily closely coordinated people over a long time. There is no completely logical thread. Ultimately, this is where I think Green's book makes its greatest contribution. It tells the long, complex story, bringing briefly into view a large number of characters. In so doing, it encourages the reader to seek additional sources of information on this period of history.

Green is not a professional historian. Rather, according to the back flap of the dust cover, he is "an Emmy-nominated award-winning writer, producer and playwright who uses his print and video experience to tell stories about science, technology and engineering." Such "historians" are perhaps a wave of the future as readers' expectations for "exciting" history reading...