Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly et al. (review)

Computer: A History of the Information Machineversion 3.0 is here, and the biggest, best update yet to this classic text is welcome news. The first two iterations of Computeradmirably served students and other newcomers to the history of computing, but as the book ages, so too grows the need to modernize it. To put this need in perspective, consider that most of the undergraduate students now taking courses for which Computeris assigned barely remember using computers in 2004, when the book’s second edition came out, and some were not even born in 1996 when the first edition was published. Tellingly, in 2012, when I last used the second edition to teach a history of computing course, I found that even the most diligent students struggled to orient themselves in a narrative that used MS-DOS, AOL, Napster, Apple II, and Netscape as guideposts.

To say that much has changed in computing since 2004, let alone 1996, is an understatement. The same holds true for the field of history of computing, which provides the scholarly sources on which Computeris grounded. The good news is that the new edition of Computerhas been revised to reflect both the changes in computing and the changes in the historical study of computing. Toward that end, the original coauthors of the first and second editions, preeminent historians of computing Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, were joined by two of the most active scholars in the next generation of historians of computing: Nathan Ensmenger and Jeffrey R. Yost. Given the inclusion of two new authors, it should not be surprising that the difference between the second and third editions is much greater than the difference between the first and second.

In the broadest terms, Computersucceeds in meeting its goal of serving as an “authoritative, semi-popular history of computing” (p. x). It remains clearly written, technically sound, and accessible to a general audience. Its narrative now includes prominent new technologies (and their associated companies) and scholarly perspectives. To account for recent technology-related developments, the third edition covers Google, Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, tablets, and smartphones in the course of greatly expanded discussions of the Internet, especially the World Wide Web and its technological, economic, and political outgrowths.

Just as important as the addition of recent developments is the restructuring of the book’s coverage of earlier history. Some sections have changed much more than others. The first five chapters, which pertain to precomputing and early computing, have remained essentially the same over the three editions. As before, the narrative begins with Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine and takes the reader on a now-canonical trajectory passing through the 1890 Census, NCR, the early decades of IBM, analog computers, Aiken’s Mark I, the ABC, ENIAC, EDVAC, EDSAC, UNIVAC, and IBM’s entry into electronic digital computing. New to this part of the third edition is the addition of a brief discussion of the precomputer theoretical work of Alonzo Church and Alan Turing.

Substantial revisions appear in the remaining two-thirds of the book. The story of mainframe computing has been streamlined, including dropping altogether the subject of the 1970s failure of IBM’s Future System. The mainframe story has also been reoriented away from the era’s influence on IBM and toward a narrative that emphasizes the broader legacies, particularly to banking and science, of corporations’ and government agencies’ early efforts to adopt computer technology. The book’s survey of the origins and influence of real time computing has been expanded beyond its initial coverage of Whirlwind, Sabre, and the UPC to include an extensive discussion of credit cards and ATMs—this goes a long way toward enabling a general audience to connect with the history of computing.

The chapter on the history of software has been overhauled for the better. It now provides a gentler introduction to programming. The arcane (by the standards of a popular...