this is a fascinating book. well written, easy to read and absorb. very informative. a book that all need to read at this time to educate ourselves on the subject of smallpox and its history from early times to its eradication from the world.
i higly recomend it.

AM I CRAZY, OR IS IT MY SHRINK? is written by two psychologists and one journalist. It offers good descriptions of various therapies and how they work. The language of this book has a very academic, clinical tone, which makes its valuable information a bit dry to assimilate. Some cautions about the therapeutic process are discussed, but not enough on the ways to tell if you, as a patient, are with an inappropriate or wacky therapist. I found it a good book with only a few reservations.

The very first sentence of this book is "This book is about people, not machines". Well, that's fine for me, but I find it difficult to apprehend what these people have done without a minimum of information about the machines. By this, I mean more than just enumerating the size, weight and number of components of each machine! The big flaw in this this book is the lack of (clear) description of what each individual cited has brought to the development of computers. For example, describing the post WWII period, the author states "Turing's design was that far ahead of everyone else's. Even von Neumann's machine lacked some of the sophistication of Turing's, which has had a profound influence on the fastest and largest of modern computers.(footnote 4 p212)" Unfortunately, there is not a single word explaining what this design was, or the influence it had! The author prefers spending time explaining that "(Von Neumann) enjoyed sex, for the pleasure of it, but without emotional involvement.(p 179)"... Another example: the chapter on "flip-flops" is utterly unintelligible if you have not read the excellent book "CODE - The hidden language of computer hardware and software" by Charles Petzold. In summary, I am very disappointed by this book, I would rather recommend anyone to read Petzold's one!

This book really covers the history of computer engineering from 1945-1965, between the first practical computer, and IBM's dominance.

It does give a good insight into the extensive history and heritage of the first real computers, the UNIVACs. It's easy these days to be fooled into feeling that history begins around 1969 with UNIX, and this book is helpful in illuminating the "Dark Ages".

The preamble sections about Babbage, and about computing prehistory, are interesting too, but a little disconnected from the later stuff (as indeed they were, historically).

However, I have a couple of complaints. Firstly, the book is in desperate need of a thorough proof-reading: the technical details have mostly been relegated to footnotes, but are frequently wrong in obvious ways, or consist of unhelpful analogies, and give the impression that the author has little scientific knowledge. The final chapter repeats, verbatim, sections of earlier ones, and is clearly tacked on (for a better coverage of the 70s-80s, read Steven Levy's "Hackers").

Secondly, there is very little computer science history in the book: no reference to Post, Turing (except as an engineer) or Church, or to their work of the 30s. (Read Andrew Hodges' "Turing..." for this); nor serious technical discussions of the subject matter covered. There is also no mention anywhere of FORTRAN or Lisp which were critical innovations occuring in the late 50s, the same timeframe as this book.

I guess "the History of UNIVAC" wouldn't have been such a catchy title.

I recently read this book and "Computer : A History of the Information Machine" (The Sloan Technology Series) by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray(Contributor). Between the two books you get a fairly thorough treatment of the events that led to the modern computer and the historical development of these machines. "Engines of the Mind" is much more focused on the people that are behind the story, and less focused on the businesses and theory of computing that those individuals helped advance.

Mr. Shurkin starts his novel at the beginning, quite literally, walking through early usage of numbers and counting through the development of modern numbers. Anyone familiar with early history will recognize the tale, although some interesting insights are provided. He then walks us through a fairly detailed treatment of Charles Babbage, and even describes fairly well the theory behind the development of his Difference Engine. We are then walked through the development of punch card machines to aid the US in post Civil War censuses, which leads to Hollerith's founding Tabulating Machine Co. which would become IBM. Shurkin focuses on the individuals that developed these main frames, so we then spend some time on ENIAC and its many offspring. Here the author starts to diverge into a somewhat personal discussion of who was the "real" founder of the mainframe, and thus the computer. The author does a good job of saying he does not believe Von Neumann's claims to be this father, and that Atanasoff's claims appear fictitious as well. Regardless of who 'wins' this argument, it would have been nice to know more of the author's own background in order to understand whether or how he was biased. The book wraps up with the development of Microsoft and Apple, but again focuses more on the backgrounds of their charasmatic leaders rather than the business forces that led those companies to their prominence.

The story is told logically and does a good job of letting the reader peek at the character of those people who were instrumental in the development of the computer. However, it would have been nice to see more of the overall environment in which these decisions were made. I believe that this book, combined with Campbell-Kelly and Aspray's book do a good job of telling the whole story regarding the development of the PC (neither focus much on theory), it would be wrong to read just one of them. I recommend this book, however, I would read the other text first.