Peter Tillman's Reviews > Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

An interesting and discursive early history of the electronic digital computer, around and after WW2, with a history of the Princeton NJ area back to colonial days, and the history of the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study there. The local history stuff you can safely skim or skip, the IAS stuff is also peripheral (but interesting). But when Dyson gets to John von Neumann's biography (chapter 4), the pace picks up, and picks up even more when he gets to the computer history. Von Neumann was a genius, and things move quickly in wartime. I love reading about bright engineers at work. Many of the parts for the first IAS computer were war-surplus and/or picked for easy troubleshooting. The academic mathematicians hated the engineers, and succeeded in getting the IAS program shut down in the 1950s. Too bad.

There are more more detours to come, but Dyson is a fine historian and did his homework. At his best, this is 5-star writing -- from hydrogen bombs to stellar evolution! -- but the odd structure and detours were distracting. 3.5 stars, rounded down for that.

For real reviews, I recommend Alan Scott's https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... and John Gribbin's https://www.goodreads.com/review/show... I expected to like this one more than I did, for the reasons Alan (and others) spell out.