A brief history of computers

I read a good description of the affair in James Essinger's "Jacquard's Web" - came down to the machinist cutting the gears not-to-spec, for the geartrains to function smoothly they would have needed precision not achieved for decades. The Royal Society was willing to fund the project but it became a bottomless money pit as Babbage kept sending the parts back to the kitchen so to speak.

What would be a good, more academic overview of computing history? Do you have any specific book recommendations? I'd love to read a more "citation-based" version.

I don't recommend reading this. There are many gaps and a lot of important history missing, including:

1. Computation before ~1800. Abacus, Napier's Bones, Slides rules, Pascal's Calculator, motivations from celestial navigation and astronomy.

2. Modern analog computers ~1900-1950. The author seems to refer to them as "math machines" and leaves it at that, without exploring much deeper than that they were used for besides calculating firing solutions for artillery. I think the author lacks a solid grasp of how mathematical tables were used from 1614 onwards, and that analog computers were used to create much more accurate and complex tables which could be used for more accurate firing solutions. And for other purposes as well, beyond code-breaking.

>"It's hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that early, pre-general purpose computers (~1890-1950s) weren't computers in the way that we think about computers today. I prefer to think about them as "math machines"."

>"But subsequent machines were able to do math. From what I'm seeing, it sounds like a lot of it was military use. A ton of code-breaking efforts during World War II. Also a bunch of projectile calculations for artillery fire."

3. Poor description of the advent of electronic computers.

>"Then in the 1940s, there was a breakthrough.[10] The vacuum tube took computers from being mechanical to being electric. In doing so, they made computers cheaper, quieter, more reliable, more energy efficient, about 10-100x smaller, and about 100x faster. They enabled computations to be done in seconds rather than hours or days. It was big."

It was certainly a breakthrough, but the idea that computers immediately became quieter, cheaper, and more reliable is false. They were much larger, initially, compared to analog computers of the era. By almost any measure, they were also much less efficient with energy, though this may depend on what sort of calculations you are doing - I'm less sure of this.

4. Incomplete and incorrect descriptions of programming languages and the history of digital logic. No mention of information theory and Claude Shannon, digital circuits.

This is a poor analogy that misleads a reader who is unfamiliar with programming languages, it obscures the abstraction:

>"Think of it like this. It's translating between two languages. Assembly is one language and looks like this: LOAD R1, #10. Machine code is another language and looks like this: 10010010110101010011110101000010101000100101. Just like how English and Spanish are two different languages."

5. Lack of understanding of digital hardware.

The author never describes why or how vacuum tubes and then transistors allowed computers to use logic that is both digital and electronic.

The author jumbles a lot of ideas into one and does not seem to understand the relationship and distinction between the evolution of transistor technology (point-contact -> BJT -> FET -> MOSFET) and the creation of integrated circuits.

>"Before 1966, transistors were a thing, but they weren't the transistors that we imagine today. Today we think of transistors as tiny little things on computer chips that are so small you can't even see them. But before 1966, transistors were much larger. Macroscopic. Millimeters long. I don't really understand the scientific or engineering breakthroughs that allowed this to happen, but something called photolithography allowed them to actually manufacture the transistors directly on the computer chips."

6. Lack of historical context. No mention of the motivations for creating the vacuum tube or transistor: amplification and switching for use in telegraph and phone networks. No mention of the role the US government played beyond the 1860 Census, no mention of continued investments motivated by the Cold War, Apollo Program, ICBMs, etc. They briefly cover artillery firing solutions and mention code-breaking.

7. Over reliance on LLMs to research and write this.

Hard to take a history which includes this seriously:

>"And from what ChatGPT tells me, it's likely that this would have been an investment with a positive ROI. It'd make the construction of mathematical tables significantly faster and more reliable, and there was a big demand for such tables. It makes sense to me that it'd be a worthwhile investment. After all, they were already employing similar numbers of people to construct the tables by hand."

>"Anyway, all of this goodness lead to things really picking up pace. I'm allowed to quote Claude, right?"

A lot of similar things come into play if you ask questions like "Could the Romans have invented $X?"

Some cultural factors like slavery meant they were less interested in e.g. labor-saving inventions. And there probably were health and life sciences concepts you could introduce--but might have limited ability to prove. But, for the most part, there are technology trees that you can't really shortcut and, even with the right high-level knowledge, it's hard to accelerate things too mych.

>It's not what Godel was hoping for. Godel was hoping to add some support to that shaky Jenga piece at the bottom so that they could continue building their beautiful tower taller and taller, consisting of structures ever more elegant.

Gödel was a Lutheran Platonist who was personally morally opposed to Logicism and his contemporary mathematical program. He was an odd man, really, but he was in no respect a booster of, or a person working to promote Hilbert's program. He was tearing it down very deliberately.