Origins of Cyberspace: A Library on the History of Computing, Networking, and Telecommunications (review)

In this lavishly illustrated and elegantly produced volume, the book dealer Jeremy M. Norman, the bibliographer Diana H. Hook, and the historian Michael R. Williams have combined to describe a library of important works in the history of computing and telecommunications assembled by Norman between 1996 and 2001. After a general introduction and a useful time line, Hook and Norman list and describe 1,411 titles, discussed in six chapters.

The first and shortest chapter notes sixteen works from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries on calculating devices and mathematics. The second is devoted largely to published works of or relating to Charles Babbage and other inventors of difference engines. The third includes correspondence and publications relating to nineteenth-century telegraphy and telefacsimile, as well as a few early-twentieth-century works on television. Correspondence of the British telegraph engineer Latimer Clark is particularly prominent.

The fourth chapter describes a wide range of trade literature, published papers, exhibition catalogs, and books relating to computing before World War II, the era of adding and calculating machines, punched-card tabulating machines, and printed mathematical tables. The fifth and longest chapter is devoted to computing from World War II to about 1970. The final chapter, which overlaps chronologically, describes newspaper clippings, publications, technical plans, and a variety of other materials associated with computer pioneer J. Presper Eckert.

In addition to giving basic bibliographic information, for each title Hook and Norman describe the provenance, as far as it is known, and give a brief account of its historical importance. Scattered throughout are documents in a lighter vein, such as a souvenir photograph of calculating prodigy Jacques Inaudi showing numbers flowing from his brain; the first published version of Karel Capek's play R. U. R. (1920), which introduced the term "robot"; and sheet music for the IBM theme song.

This volume amply demonstrates the disparate nature of the sources that have been important to the history of computing and telecommunications. Along with accounts of calculating devices and catalogs of mathematical instruments, one has papers and books on mathematics and mathematical logic, discussions of the Jacquard loom in conjunction with the introduction of automatic control and punched cards, and reports of diverse government projects that were central to the origin of the electronic computer. Moreover, now that the computer has come to play a central role in communications as well as computation, literature relating to telegraphy and information theory is included. Historians might prefer to have single articles or issues of scientific journals singled out in a bibliography rather than separated in a private collection, but that is not the collector's focus.

Origins of Cyberspace suggests how fragile much of the fundamental literature of computing and communications is. Rather than the bound books and manuscript letters on fine paper of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, one has carbon copies, mimeographs, and publications printed on highly acidic paper. At the same time, Hook and Norman suggest the difficulty of maintaining an international perspective on the history of computing and telecommunications. Their volume contains scattered references to developments in Germany, Italy, Japan, Denmark, Switzerland, and even Argentina, but the vast majority of their sources are from Great Britain and the United States. To understand cyberspace as an international phenomenon requires more than these sources provide.

Finally, as is often the case with science and technology that emerged after 1940, it is difficult to gauge how much material remains hidden under the cover of national security. Many of the early documents relating to ENIAC, Whirlwind, and SAGE were classified but have now been made public. Some such documents are in this collection. But there is nothing relating to the British Colossus or to later computer development at the National Security Agency in the United States.

It might...