Rating: 
Summary: Modern computer history with strong U.S. bias
Review: This is a history of the computer as a business tool and really only goes into detail after the ENIAC. There are interesting and informative parts on pre-computer office organisation and on human computers. Hardware from before 1945 is dealt with in a perfunctory manner: if I didn't already know what a differential analyser was like, I wouldn't find out from this book. Konrad Zuse gets just one sentence, and the Colossus similar short shrift. Actually this is understandable, because William Aspray has already edited a book on early machinery, "Computing Before Computers" which goes into great detail and has excellent pictures. Martin Campbell-Kelly also contributed to this book, which I suppose is Volume I and "History of the Information Machine" is Volume II. Little attention is paid to events outside the USA. I may be prejudiced, but nevertheless I find it interesting that a tea-shop chain developed a business computer which was demonstrated before Royalty a year before UNIVAC's famous TV appearance; and that Sir Charles Darwin, grandson of the other well-known Charles Darwin, was prominent in the development of the Pilot ACE. Neither fact is mentioned. Sir Clive Sinclair, who produced the first hobby computer that could actually be called cheap, doesn't appear in the book either. So buy this book - but try to get "Computing Before Computers" and "Early British Computers" (by Simon Lavington) as well.
Rating: 
Summary: A "must read" in the history of computers
Review: This is an important book: it is written at a (reasonably) accessible level for non-specialists, but emphasises the evolution of the ideas involved , rather than emphasising the personalities and the "gee whizz" as so many non-technical books do.
Some gentle debunking in here too, and some refutations (or clarifications) of popular myths. And lots of material not covered in most histories of the computer.
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