Turing's Cathedral

If you leave out Dyson's few ‘prophetic' interpretations, then this is an anthology of the Institute for Advanced Study's years when they built the MANIAC-0 (now: IAS machine) - one of the first computers based on the Universal Turing machine. Dyson untangles and entangles the many lives that came through Princeton during those years to help build the machine. We get biographies, quotes, lost documentation from the institute's archives, tales of housing logistics and partying engineers. And the story also visits Los Alamos, where the same people who build computers, work on the atomic and hydrogen bomb. At the center of this giant net of disciplines and ideas you find the genius tying everything together: John von Neumann.

Sometimes too detailed, sometimes not didactic enough, but i loved the portraits Dyson painted of these men and women, who dedicated their lives to jumpstart this digital world we live in now. Mainly i come away from the book with this understanding that the invention of the computer is naturally a wide-spread fuzzy collaborative effort where no-one truly stands out, but everyone builds on top of other's ideas.