A History of Modern Computing (review)

A History of Modern Computing. By Paul Ceruzzi. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998. Pp. x+398. $35/$18.95.

The history of modern computing is an enormous field of inquiry that awaits all kinds of research. Paul Ceruzzi has taken a big step in A History of Modern Computing, a broad sweep concerned mainly with twentieth-century America. Computing means many different things--hardware, software, programming, business strategy, networks, people--and Ceruzzi successfully incorporates all of these into a single volume. He covers a lot of ground in a book of reasonable length, making it a very appropriate text, particularly for seminars in the history of technology and computing. This is a solid contribution to the history of technology, but it also falls under the category of business history. While it is obvious that the history of computing involves much more than hardware, Ceruzzi's presentation of computing as a story of commerce and industry is important: the postwar economy and competitive free market allowed the United States to lead the state of the art in computer technology, and it was due to the lack of such a system that the Soviet Union lagged far behind in computer development.

Ceruzzi does not imply that any single institution drove the growth of computing in America; business and scientific/engineering spheres each demanded computers. While IBM had distinct business and scientific computing divisions, Ceruzzi wisely chooses not to overemphasize Big Blue, about which much has been written already by former IBM employees and others. Instead, he introduces many of America's smaller computer firms, giving equal attention to Engineering Research Associates, Eckert-Mauchly and UNIVAC, Remington-Rand, Honeywell, and many others.

The list of computer corporations is woven together with attention to the evolution of operating systems, computer languages, and other topics that many earlier computing histories have ignored, especially software. As Ceruzzi introduces these he tries to link them with individuals, noting, for example, Bill Joy's role in the development of UNIX as an accessible language. (Bill Gates, fortunately, does not take center stage among the characters Ceruzzi introduces.) As with any survey, the author can do little more than mention many important characters in the story. Still, a little more information about certain individuals, such as Herbert Grosch, would have been worthwhile; midway through the book Ceruzzi describes Grosch as a "colorful" character in the history of computing, but does not explain why he calls him that (p. 177).

Personalities aside, Ceruzzi successfully explains what otherwise could have been intimidating engineering terminology: he describes core memory, for instance, as "small, doughnut-shaped pieces of material through which several fine wires are threaded to store information" (p. 49). Core memory provided random access memory, today commonly called RAM. There is a simple primer of computer architectural terminology, which is useful because many older terms have become obsolete. Ceruzzi understands how computers work and he can explain them in simple terms, leading the reader from the familiar to the unfamiliar without "dumbing down" his narrative so much that it will bore computer specialists. There are many good photographs.

Last, Ceruzzi covers mainframes, chips, workstations, and the rise of personal computers, even referring to Apple's expensive and not very successful Lisa. Appropriately, he does not concentrate on the history of the Internet, a subject that Janet Abbate and others have covered. Overall, A History of Modern Computing is a well-written, user-friendly survey that will prove valuable both to historians of technology and to people with more general interests. Furthermore, it drives home the point that historians have barely begun to explore the impact of one of the most important technologies for the twenty-first century.

Anne Fitzpatrick

Dr. Fitzpatrick, who works at Los Alamos National Laboratory, is writing a comparative history of computing in the Soviet and American nuclear weapons programs. She is joint editor of "Events and Sightings" for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.

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