When my father (Norman Macrae who deputy edited The Economist for most of last half century) and I wrote this book in 1984 , we wanted to say Goodbye to Orwell - and his Big Brother fears for the human race. We did this by visioning an internetting age which my father dubbed the 3rd - and greatest - transport revolution created by human beings. Our time scenarios have been out by a years or so as in any good future narrative, but the megatrend of the global internetting age is just about on track to enter the 3rd millennium. When we wrote the book in 1984, critics slammed us as the most optimistic futurists ever to go to print. If we were revising the book today, we'd have to raise the optimistic gear more than ever. The next decade will be make or break for seeding the promise of e-business and e-society. We believe this is the most imaginative time for being alive that human beings have had the luck - and indeed the responsibility to make happen. sincerely, chris macrae, wcbn007@easynet.co.uk chief infomediary , brandknowledge.com

Norman Macrae worked at The Economist, spanning 5 decades as its most prolific editorial writer, during a period which saw the paper grow from 4th ranked British weekly to one-of-kind world leadership viewspaper.

In the late 1960s Macrae started writing annual surveys such as Discover Japan (for which 30 years later he received one of Japan's greatest honours - The Order of the Rising Sun).

The Annual Surveys increasingly blended future trends and human vision with economics in an unique way. Telecommuting was one of the words Macrae coined; like Drucker - a contemporary and intellectual frined - entrepreneurs, intrapreneurs , knowledge workers, multi-cultural fusions of competitive and collaborative innovation were early and regular heroes of Macrae's work. When Norman realised that computers would soon power the world's people to start internetworking, he wrote a book - published in 1984 in the UK (to celebrate bye bye to Orwell's Big Brother world) and in 1985 in USA - visioning the first 40 years of this "3rd great revolution" transporting human productivity and every kind of interpersonal connections.

Connectivity he opined would bring great progress economically and socialy, globally and particularly locally, as long as the world didn't let madmen blow it up. This would be quite a careless outcome but one which governments (both national and corporate) would be quite competent at managing (a word whose origin is to do with how people rule over horses) if they decided to cling to the last vestages of power and lack of transparency that the previously disconnected and mass mediated age had let them profit from.

Today, technology is posing that final examination of mankind (as Buckimister Fuller described it). Let's hope we transparently emerge from the other side, since I'd like my five year-old to enjoy the true benefits of what an internetworking century could achieve if we could all respect every human relationship we enter through real and virtual modes - recognising that those who are poorest need the most help and not to be taken advantage of by the most powerful and rich.

...

PS Other references for bookworms to the futurist school of global networking of the early eighties include Toffler and Naisbitt. Mathematically, Macrae completed his odyssey of researching the origins of the computer age - and the visions the founders hoped for it - when he wrote the biography of Johnny von Neumann as one of his first duties of retiring from The Economist.

This biography of one of the most impressive scientists of this century is both interesting and well written. The author gives a precise and thoughtful account of vN's life. I especially liked the fact that he does not dwell too much on the usual stories (such as von Neumann's memory power, or his famous Princeton parties) but tries to go beyond the public image. The best part of the book, to my opinion, is the section that describes Hungary -and especially its high school system- at the beginning of this century. My main criticism is that the book is rather shallow when explaining the scientific contributions of vN. The author is a journalist and not a mathematician/physicists, and he does not do a terrible job at explaining science. This is especially true for the economics contributions of vN. It is very clear to me that the author does not understand very well the progresses made by modern economic theory thanks to vN contributions (utility theory and game theory).The author, obsessed with Japan and competition, has comments with respect to the academic economics profession (whom I belong to...) that can probably be best explained by the fact that he is a PhD dropout. Anyway, this is very interesting book that I recommend to those interested in the evolution of mathematics, physics and technical warfare (but NOT economics!) in the XXth century.

It seems that as time passes and nuclear secrets are gradually declassified, we get longer and longer biographies of John von Neumann. MacRae's biography is helpful, partly because it is fairly recent, and partly because MacRae gives us a glimpse of the worldly side of John von Neumann. The book captures his social style, his special expertise at bluffing, his sense of academic showmanship, his political power -- and shows how adroitly he used that power and his own mystique to push through his technical insights and decisions.

Von Neumann was a trained chemical engineer. Although chemistry is usually remarked as the slightest of his credentials, he knew it and used it. This book includes the story of how he applied mathematics and chemistry to the development, delivery and control of explosive weapons - first chemical, and then nuclear.

Von Neumann's work on explosives is a common thread that runs through his work and pulls together many of his interests that - seen in isolation - seem amazingly disparate. His interests in computers, aerodynamics, parlour game theory and even meteorology were all rooted in or entrained by his fascination with explosive weapons. (For a thermonuclear weapon, for example, the weather is a delivery system for fallout.)

In 1938, von Neumann first became a consultant to the United States military, working at the Aberdeen proving grounds in Maryland. He began by improving the aim of very large guns with explosive shells. It was a surprisingly complicated business because it involved winds aloft, turbulent flow, impacts, and expanding shock fronts of explosive charges. It was on one of his frequent trips to Aberdeen that he encountered one of the University of Pennsylvania engineers working on ENIAC. Von Neumann was unsatisfied with the analog computers then used for weapons work, and plunged into the problem of improving the nascent digital machine. Ultimately he created a digital computer at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton. His purpose in building this particular machine was to use it to complete the design of the hydrogen bomb.

After the war began, von Neumann was sent to England to study the damage inflicted by German bombs during the blitz. He noticed the German bombs were not completely effective because they buried themselves before exploding. Von Neumann used this insight to invent the "air burst" explosive. Thereafter, allied bombs worldwide were fused to go off before they hit the ground. The technique vastly improved their destructive power. Hiroshima was an air burst. At Nagasaki, the bomb was an implosion weapon characterized at Los Alamos as "von Neumann's bomb" because of the implosive detonator he helped develop for it.

MacRae evidently admires von Neumann's accomplishments as a weaponeer, and as a political advocate of weapons development, but he does not quite convey von Neumann's personal sophistication and sense of scientific inquiry.

For example, in developing the digital computer von Neumann talked to a number of neurobiologists. For the most part he believed what they told him and adapted whatever he found useful. His Silliman lectures, reprinted as his book on The Computer and The Brain, includes his credulous precis on the neurobiology of the early 1950s. But von Neumann also noticed and questioned something few neurophysiologists bother themselves about - then or now - which is the fact that the retinal cells of the eye look backward. They are pointed toward the back wall of the eye, and not out at the world. Perhaps these cells see there a thin film diffraction pattern, and not the literal visual picture our brain shows us as an image of the world. Also, in a book by the editor of The Economist, one might expect a bit more on von Neumanns contributions to economics.

Withal, it is difficult to understand why such a civilized, curious, well spoken, socially adroit and erudite man was so intrigued by explosives. To try to make sense of von Neumann you can also read several other books - there exists no single coherent biography. Find "von Neumann and Weiner," two half-biographies in one volume by Heims; The superb Prisoner's Dilemma, by Poundstone; and for historical context, the Rhodes books on the making of the Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs.

After von Neumann's death, his concepts of strategic games were highly elaborated at the RAND corporation, and ultimately became U.S. nuclear policy. MacRae touches on this legacy, but the best book on this great chunk of obscured American history is The Wizards of Armageddon, by Kaplan. It would be interesting to know if von Neumann's theory of parlour games was also used to formulate strategic policy for the Viet Nam disaster. It would not be surprising.

My father wrote this book after retiring from his career long job as The Economist's longest serving staff writer. Here are some comments on what other reviewers have said.

It's true my father never studied for a phd in economics; if you'd just served in world war 2, got a first in economics in Cambridge and been offered a job at The Economist, you'd probably not have seen any practical point in that either. ( If you want to go into who knows what about 21st C futures, internetworking,intangible assets and new economics, I'm sure we can link you to that at http://www.normanmacrae.com )

It may be that some of my father's admiration for Von Neumann also got blended with his world views. But Von Neumann's family -whom my father worked closely with - didn't want any of that blend diluted.

My father was aiming primarily to explain to everyone why Von Neumann was one of the 2 great mathematicians of the 20th century and what background great mathematicians grow up in. In trying to make that accessible to everyone, he clearly doesn't go into the depth of mathematics theory that might stimulate today's hundred greatest living mathematicians. Everyone else will probably find the mathematical content suitable for a biography which they want to learn from.

Moreover, Von Neumann was the first mathematician to insist that the subject's future lay mainly in teamwork facilitated by computing rather than individual mathematical power. Not every academic has understood that point the way Johy would have hoped.

chris macrae, wcbn007@easynet.co.uk Marketing Electronic Learning NETwork http://www.egroups.com/group/melnet2

The major difficulty in writing a scientific biography of von Neumann is that it is impossible to do justice to his tremendous scientific achievements without going into technicalities that are not accessible for the average reader. Macrae's book deliberately avoids discussing technicalities in detail, and while this makes it possible to give a very readable, comprehensive picture of von Neumann's life and its personality -- especially in context of the current socio-economic conditions -- reading the book one cannot really understand and appreciate why he is regarded by the sharpest minds of this century as a true genius.

John Von Neumann's incredible contributions to a vast array of fields are often overlooked and he is identified strictly with respect to one or two (game theory, the computer, and the development of nuclear weapons). But Von Neumman's contributions spawned such fields as mathematical economics and artifical intelligence as well as many new kinds of mathematics. The only thing lacking in this book is more mathematical detail about his work.