Jacquard's Web

COmPuTErS ARE lOOmS thAT Weave INformATion

You can tell the Essinger really likes this metaphor because he beats it to death.

It's not a great book. It spends a paragraph talking about the Jacquard loom, and then spends a chapter talking about his dad, and then three chapters talking about Babbage, and then zooms through IBM. There's a teensy mension of Turing, but none of Church, or von Neumann, or Hopper, or of Bell Labs, or anything like that. It's just a collection of people who like punch cards and their dads. Lots of dads.

The book has a frustrating habit of quoting other biographies, and telling us how nothing is known about these people, and quoting long passages from Charles Dickens because it was inspired by Babbage, and, of course, about everyone's dad. And the book never seems to be on any of the subject matters' sides — it's often talking about how politically stupid they were, and how its their own fault for these things, and stuff like that. Maybe it's true, but it's not why we're here.