The Computer Book

The Computer Book has 250 milestones from the history of computing, starting with the ancient Abacus (c. 2500 BCE) and ending with a think-piece about the ultimate limits of computation (~9999), which explains Seth Lloyd's article that appeared in Nature. The Computer Book is part of Sterling's popular Milestones series, so each full-page spread has a year, the milestone, a list of the "inventors," and a brief essay (≈350 words), alongside a beautiful photograph.

Amusingly, the book was listed by Amazon as the #1 book in the Ada Programming Language, presumably because it has an article about Ada Lovelace. What a silly algorithm!

My co-author on the book is Rachel H. Grunspan. Together we worked hard to be sure that the book has more than just technology—it also has tons of cultural references, like premiere of Star Trek (1966) and the role of social media in the Arab Spring (2011). Rachel even tracked down the origin of the word Cyberspace (1968)—and it wasn't William Gibson, despite what Wikipedia (2001) says (I should fix that.)

I'm putting information about the book here, but you can find more information on the Amazon website.

Errata

In the description of the Sumerian abacus the Hebrew letters are in reverse order (it says kaba, but it's supposed to be abaq - the transliteration is correct). Presumably this is a right-to-left Unicode error.