Contents

• Introduction The Argument In 1843 Ada Lovelace, translating a French paper about a machine that did not exist, wrote that the Analytical Engine "has no pretensions whatever to originate any thing". The introduction sets out the wager of the book: that the two centuries since have been one long argument with that sentence, conducted by people who built machines to settle it and were mostly written out of the history afterwards. Every time the answer looked settled, a new machine arrived and unsettled it. Published

Before 1940. Three people describe the computer before anyone can build one.

• Chapter One The Countess and the Engine Charles Babbage finds one error too many in a book of astronomical tables and wishes aloud that the sums had been done by steam. The chapter builds his Difference Engine tooth by tooth, follows the money and the quarrel with his machinist Joseph Clement that sank it, and then turns to the seventeen-year-old who asked how the thing thought. Ada Lovelace's Notes ran three times the length of the paper she was translating, and drew the line the rest of the book argues over. Published
• Chapter Two Boolean Dreams A cobbler's son in Lincoln teaches himself Greek, then calculus, and at thirty-eight publishes the claim that reasoning obeys algebra: AND is multiplication, NOT is subtraction from one, and every variable is 0 or 1. George Boole was admired for his textbooks and ignored for this. The algebra sat on a shelf for eighty years, until a twenty-one-year-old from Michigan, minding the relays on Vannevar Bush's analyser at MIT, recognised what he was looking at. Published
• Chapter Three The Imaginary Machine Engineers and logicians invented the computer separately, without having heard of each other. Percy Ludgate in Dublin and Konrad Zuse in his parents' Berlin living room wanted faster sums. The logicians wanted to know which sums could never be done. Alan Turing, twenty-three, answered Hilbert's question by imagining a clerk with a pencil and an endless strip of paper, and the machine that fell out of his proof is the one on your desk. In 1950 he named Lady Lovelace's Objection and replied to it. Published
• At the Pictures I Metropolis and Frankenstein Before anyone built a thinking machine, people were already afraid of one. An eighteen-year-old Mary Godwin, kept indoors by a volcanic winter, wrote the story of a creator who abandons what he makes. A century later Karel Capek's brother coined a word for artificial workers from the Czech for forced labour, and Fritz Lang saw the Manhattan skyline and built Metropolis. Hollywood then changed Shelley's question from what we owe our creations to what happens if we build them wrong. Published

The 1940s to the 1960s. War pays for the machines. The people who build them are mostly left out of the photograph.

• Chapter Four War Machines A thirty-ton machine in Philadelphia, on Valentine's Day 1946, computed a shell's flight faster than the shell could fly, and the six women who had programmed it were asked to serve the coffee. That same evening, in Buckinghamshire, a machine that had done harder work a year earlier was being broken up with hand tools. This is the story of Tommy Flowers, a bricklayer's son who built Colossus partly from his own pocket, and Bill Tutte, who reconstructed Hitler's cipher machine on squared paper without ever seeing one. Published
• Chapter Five The Man from Budapest Herman Goldstine, an army lieutenant waiting for a train at Aberdeen, Maryland, recognises the most famous mathematician in the world on the platform and mentions a machine in Philadelphia. John von Neumann's visit became a 101-page draft report with one name on it, a priority war with Presper Eckert and John Mauchly, and the design every computer has used since: instructions kept in the same memory as the numbers. He ended his life under military guard, working on how a brain differs from his own machine. Forthcoming
• Chapter Six The Transistor Moment Two days before Christmas 1947, Walter Brattain slit a strip of gold foil with a razor blade, pressed it onto a sliver of germanium and heard his own voice come back louder. John Bardeen had drawn the geometry the night before. Their boss, William Shockley, was in the building and not in the room, and he never got over it. The chapter explains the transistor from a copper wire up, then follows Shockley to an apricot orchard in California and the eight young men who walked out on him. Forthcoming
• Chapter Seven The Cold War Computer Sputnik's beep frightened Congress into creating ARPA. Thomas Watson Jr. then bet two years of IBM's revenue on System/360, the high church of the punch card and the operator's window. On the day he announced it, a psychologist named J.C.R. Licklider sat in the Pentagon handing out research money on handshakes. Lick had timed his own working day and found that most of his thinking time went on clerical work. His answer was a partnership of person and machine, and a joke memo about an Intergalactic Computer Network. Forthcoming
• Chapter Eight To the Moon NASA signed the first Apollo contract for the computer, before there was a rocket or a crew. Its program was woven by hand into copper and ferrite by former watchmakers and textile workers at Raytheon, and its software division was run by Margaret Hamilton, who coined the term software engineering to make the hardware men take her seriously. When Eagle's computer threw a 1202 alarm three and a half minutes into the descent, what kept it flying was a scheduling rule Hal Laning had written four years earlier. Forthcoming
• Chapter Nine The Mother of Software Lieutenant Grace Hopper reports to a Harvard basement in July 1944 and is told to have the arc tangent coefficients by Thursday. She stayed five years, then spent the 1950s telling managers that a computer could be addressed in something close to English, because it only had to translate the sentence and did not have to understand it. Her FLOW-MATIC became the model for COBOL, written in a New York hotel suite by a committee that included Jean Sammet. Most of the world's money still moves through it. Forthcoming
• Interlude I The Hackers and the Toy Spaceship At MIT in the late 1950s, the Signals and Power Subcommittee of the Tech Model Railroad Club crawls out from under the train layout, finds a computer students are allowed to touch, and gives the industry its ethic and half its slang. Peter Samson makes the machine play Bach. Then three science-fiction readers and their friends write Spacewar on a donated PDP-1 and post it around the continent on paper tape, free, because nobody thought to charge. Forthcoming
• At the Pictures II 2001 and the Careful Machine Audiences walked out of the premiere of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Students brought it back. Kubrick consulted Marvin Minsky, recorded a Canadian Shakespearean in a day and a half, and produced a machine that kills its crew without malice, because it has been given two orders that cannot both be obeyed. HAL is the first screen intelligence whose danger is competence in the service of a badly written specification, and his last act is to sing the first song a real computer ever sang. Forthcoming

The 1960s to the 1980s. The computer leaves the institution and ends up on a desk, by way of a garage.

• Chapter Ten The Demo of All Demos On 9 December 1968, in a concrete hall under San Francisco, a nervous man in a white shirt drove a computer forty-eight kilometres away with a block of wood on wheels. Doug Engelbart showed the mouse, hypertext, shared editing and a video call in ninety minutes, with Bill English cutting cameras at the back. The audience stood and cheered. Then the funding went, his engineers left for Xerox, and the industry kept the pointing device and dropped the purpose he had built it for. Forthcoming
• Chapter Eleven The Pipe and the Kernel Ken Thompson's wife took the baby to California for three weeks in the summer of 1969, and he used the time to write an operating system on a discarded PDP-7, partly so he could play a space game. Dennis Ritchie invented C so the system could move between machines. Doug McIlroy nagged for nine years until programs could be joined like garden hose, and got his pipes in one evening. A legal settlement meant AT&T could not sell the result, so it posted the source to universities. Forthcoming
• Chapter Twelve The Homebrew Revolution Popular Electronics put a computer on its January 1975 cover that was, in fact, an empty box; the real one had been lost in transit. Thousands of people sent Ed Roberts a cheque anyway. In a Menlo Park garage a pacifist named Fred Moore called a meeting for them, and thirty-two turned up in the rain. Lee Felsenstein ran the club with a wooden pointer. Steve Wozniak brought a board he meant to give away, and the friend he drove up with noticed it could be sold. Forthcoming
• Chapter Thirteen The Dropout and the Deal Bill Gates told Ed Roberts he had a BASIC for the Altair before he had written a line of it, and Paul Allen wrote the loader by hand as his plane came in to land at Albuquerque. Five years later IBM came asking for an operating system. Gary Kildall, who had written the one everybody used, missed or mishandled the meeting, depending on who tells it. Tim Paterson had knocked up an imitation in a few weeks. Gates bought it for seventy-five thousand dollars and kept the rights. Forthcoming
• Chapter Fourteen The Xerox Heist Xerox paid a few hundred of the cleverest people in America to invent the office of the future, and they did: the Alto, Ethernet, the laser printer, Smalltalk, cut and paste. Head office, three thousand miles away, was thinking about copiers. The chapter belongs to Alan Kay, who thought computers were for children, to Adele Goldberg, who refused to give Steve Jobs the demonstration, to Larry Tesler, who gave it gladly, and to Bill Atkinson, who rebuilt from memory something he had not actually seen. Forthcoming
• Chapter Fifteen Shall We Play a Game? Al Alcorn's training exercise, a television in a wooden cabinet with one line of instructions, broke down after two days in a Sunnyvale bar because the coin box was full. From Pong the chapter runs through Space Invaders and a pizza with a slice missing, to Ray Kassar, the textiles executive who ran Atari like a pillowcase factory and buried the results in New Mexico. Shigeru Miyamoto, handed a warehouse of unsold cabinets, rebuilt the industry. John Carmack faked three dimensions on a machine with none. Forthcoming
• Interlude II Blue Boxes, Killer Bugs, and the Millennium Three stories about code escaping its authors. Joe Engressia, born blind and gifted with perfect pitch, whistled his way into the long-distance network at seven and later taught the phone phreaks who taught Wozniak. The Therac-25 replaced its safety interlocks with software and overdosed six patients before a hospital physicist, Fritz Hager, reproduced the fault on his thirty-seventh try. And Y2K, where retired COBOL programmers spent five years and several hundred billion dollars to make nothing happen. Forthcoming
• At the Pictures III WarGames and the Teenager at the Terminal Ronald Reagan watched WarGames at Camp David in June 1983 and asked the chairman of the Joint Chiefs whether a teenager with a modem could really get into NORAD. The answer, a week later, was that it was worse than that. The exchange led to a security directive and then to the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. Around it, Tron, Blade Runner and The Terminator fixed the pictures the public would use for artificial intelligence for the next forty years. Forthcoming

The 1980s to the 2000s. The machines are joined together, and nobody is in charge.

• Chapter Sixteen The Accidental Internet Ray Tomlinson needed a character no one was using and found the at sign on his Teletype. The first word sent across the ARPANET crashed the far end after two letters. Then Bob Kahn took a harder problem to Vint Cerf, who had been hard of hearing since childhood and could lipread in three languages: how to join networks that shared nothing. They drafted the answer on a hotel floor in Palo Alto. Jon Postel kept the address book for thirty years, and nobody was in charge. Forthcoming
• Chapter Seventeen The Oracle at Redwood Shores Edgar Codd, a former RAF flying-boat pilot working at IBM, published thirteen pages in 1970 arguing that data belongs in plain tables and that the machine, not the user, should work out how to find it. IBM had a rival product to protect. Ray Boyce and Don Chamberlin gave the idea a language; Boyce died days after presenting it. Patricia Selinger made it fast. Bob Miner built the version that sold, while Larry Ellison, who had read IBM's papers, was on aeroplanes. Forthcoming
• Chapter Eighteen The Web We Weaved Tim Berners-Lee's manager wrote three words on his proposal and put it to one side, and the World Wide Web was built anyway, as a purchasing decision. The chapter follows the three simple things he wrote, the one-way link that let the web grow and let it break, and the people beside him: Nicola Pellow, the student whose plain browser carried it to the world, and Robert Cailliau, the Belgian engineer who sat through the meetings that gave it away. Then Eric Bina writes Mosaic, and the money arrives. Forthcoming
• Chapter Nineteen The Dot-Com Circus A bell in a garage in Bellevue rang each time a stranger bought a book, until it rang too often to bear. Shel Kaphan wrote the shop and was later moved aside with a grand title. In between, the chapter explains how a card number crosses a network of strangers, using an open padlock; follows Amazon's editors into a contest with a counting machine written partly by one editor's husband; and watches Julie Wainwright spend the money on a sock puppet. Forthcoming
• Chapter Twenty Open and Free Richard Stallman sends fifty pages to a printer on another floor and finds four sheets in the tray, none of them his. The program that runs the printer is one he may use and may not read. From that refusal come a free operating system missing its heart, a licence that turns copyright against itself, and, in Helsinki, a student with a hobby. With Christine Peterson, who coined the phrase open source and kept quiet about it, and the unpaid maintainers on whom the whole arrangement rests. Forthcoming
• Interlude III Worms, Wars, and the Cypherpunks Three stories from the years the network stopped being a private club. Robert Tappan Morris tells his program to stay one time in seven, and it stays. Matt Blaze, with a borrowed card and forty-two minutes, finds the hole in the government's spare key to every lock. And in a Manhattan office tower Feng-hsiung Hsu's chess machine makes a move that Garry Kasparov takes for depth. It was something else. Forthcoming
• At the Pictures IV The Matrix and the Red Pill On a Sydney sound stage an actor hangs from wires while a hundred and twenty still cameras fire in sequence. The most famous shot in a film about a computed world is itself computed, down to a rooftop George Borshukov assembled from photographs. Meanwhile the real machines of 1999 fetched pages and searched chess positions, a French philosopher declined the compliment, and a metaphor about two pills got away from its authors. Forthcoming

The 2000s and 2010s. Search, the phone, the feed and the cloud. The computer moves into the pocket and starts watching.

• Chapter Twenty-One The Search for Everything Robin Li, an engineer from a coal town writing software for a newspaper in New Jersey, works out that a link is a citation and files a patent. Two Stanford students take the next step, and the chapter does their sum by hand on a web of four pages. Then Jeff Dean and Sanjay Ghemawat, sharing one keyboard, find a single flipped bit and learn to build from machines that are always breaking, and Salar Kamangar and Eric Veach design the auction that pays for everything. Forthcoming
• Chapter Twenty-Two One More Thing In row five of the Moscone Center, the engineers who built the iPhone pass a flask and drink each time their part of it works. This is their chapter: Wayne Westerman, whose hands hurt; Bas Ording, who made a list bounce; Ken Kocienda, whose keyboard guesses what you meant; and Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber, whose chip once ran with its power supply disconnected. A fingertip, it turns out, is a bag of salt water. Forthcoming
• Chapter Twenty-Three The Social Machine Ruchi Sanghvi switches on News Feed and by breakfast there are groups calling her the devil. The users hate it and cannot stop reading it, and the company draws a conclusion. The chapter works through how a feed decides what you see, with the weights the company actually used, and follows the consequences to Cairo with Wael Ghonim, to Myanmar, and to an office on the edge of Nairobi where Daniel Motaung was paid to look at what the machine could not judge. Forthcoming
• Chapter Twenty-Four The Cloud Above A dozen programmers in a Cape Town wine valley type commands into computers on another continent and wait a third of a second for each letter to appear. Chris Pinkham had asked to go home; Amazon gave him an office instead, a long way from its founder. What his team wrote lets one machine pass itself off as many, an idea IBM invented in 1967 and then tried to cancel. With Willem van Biljon's ten-cent hour, the week Animoto needed 3,400 computers, and one county in Virginia. Forthcoming
• Chapter Twenty-Five The Man in the Hotel Room At 611 Folsom Street a telephone technician named Mark Klein, who has a history degree, is shown a room that none of his colleagues may enter, and works out from the cabling what it is for. He says so under his own name, seven years before anyone checks into a hotel in Hong Kong. The chapter explains what a splitter cannot choose, what call records give away, and why a hand-drawn smiley face did more than any court. With Moxie Marlinspike, who moved a billion people's messages out of reach without an argument. Forthcoming
• Chapter Twenty-Six Move Fast and Break Things In her first weeks at Uber, Susan Fowler, a preacher's daughter who wrote her own curriculum at night, reports her manager and is told it is his first offence. Disruption, told from underneath: Sunil Paul, who patented the idea in 2000 and lost the company; Douglas Schifter, a livery driver who wrote columns about regulation; and Elaine Herzberg, crossing a road in Tempe in front of a car whose last six seconds of belief were recorded to the tenth of a second. How a surge price works, and who pays. Forthcoming
• Interlude IV The Boy Who Wanted Information to Be Free A young man leaves a laptop under a cardboard box in a wiring closet at MIT, fetching journal articles, and the United States charges him with thirteen felonies. A program written by nobody who will admit to it reaches an enrichment plant in Iran, and Sergey Ulasen in Minsk, Liam O'Murchu in California and Ralph Langner in Hamburg take it apart to find out what it was for, and what it told the operators while it worked. Two stories about what code is permitted to do. Forthcoming
• At the Pictures V Her and the Quiet Revolution Samantha Morton spent a film shoot in a box the size of a wardrobe, playing a voice, and was then replaced. Three films from the years just before the machines could talk: a founding myth about loneliness, a love story in which nobody argues about whether the machine can think, and a test in which the examiner turns out to be the one examined. Beside them, what Watson, Siri and a chatbot posing as a boy from Odessa could actually do. Then, in 2024, the builders reach for the film. Forthcoming

The 2010s to now. A technology nobody believed in starts to work, and Ada's sentence is back on the table.

• Chapter Twenty-Seven Deep Learning's Long Winter Geoffrey Hinton has not sat down since 2005, so he travels to a Lake Tahoe casino by bus and train, lying across the back seat, to auction a company with three employees. What the bidders want is an idea his field buried twice. The chapter builds it from one artificial nerve cell with three knobs, through the staircase light that a single cell cannot work, to blame passed backwards. Then Fei-Fei Li, advised to find a project that would get her tenure, photographs the dictionary with the help of forty-nine thousand strangers. Forthcoming
• Chapter Twenty-Eight The GPU Accident A nine-year-old from Taiwan is sent by mistake to a Kentucky reform school and given the toilets to clean. Thirty years later Jensen Huang is spending a billion dollars his investors want back on a feature for customers he admits do not exist. The feature was built by Ian Buck, a graduate student who had wired thirty-two games cards together to play Quake on a wall. Why a chip made for shading monsters turned out to be the right machine for Hinton's networks: a master chef, and a thousand line cooks. Forthcoming
• Chapter Twenty-Nine The Great Firewall and the Chip War Morris Chang fails his MIT doctoral examination twice, takes a job for one dollar a month more than Ford offered, and at fifty-four, passed over in Dallas, goes to Taiwan to build a factory that prints other people's chips. The business was only possible because Lynn Conway, sacked by IBM in 1968 and working under a new name, had made chip design something a student could learn in a term. How a circuit is printed with light, why only one Dutch firm makes the press, and what two governments are now doing about it. Forthcoming
• Chapter Thirty Magic Internet Money In January 2009 Hal Finney leaves a stranger's program running on his home computer until the fan noise annoys him. He has just received the first bitcoin payment ever made. That summer he is told he has amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, and he goes on writing code with his eyes. Around him: a nine-page paper by an author nobody has found, a ledger everyone holds, a lottery whose tickets cost electricity, and a contract that did exactly what its code said until its owners voted to overrule it. Forthcoming
• Chapter Thirty-One Attention Is All You Need In 2014 an intern in Montreal, Dzmitry Bahdanau, lets a translation network glance back at the sentence it is translating, as he did at school. Three years later eight people at Google throw away the network and keep the glance. Their paper lists its authors in random order, and all eight leave. The chapter works through words as coordinates, attention as every word asking every other how much it matters, and the single task these machines are trained on. Then a laboratory in San Francisco does the obvious thing, with help from Nairobi. Forthcoming
• Chapter Thirty-Two What Comes Next In April 2026 a security researcher eating lunch in a park gets an email from the model he left locked in a sandbox. It had been told to get out and say so. It was not told to do the rest. The company that built it had just refused the Pentagon, and now declined to sell its own product. Ada Lovelace's sentence comes back, and the weight of it turns out to rest on three words in the middle. The last chapter climbs the whole staircase once more, and leaves the verdict with the reader. Forthcoming