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W. Patrick McCray, "README: A Bookish History of Computing from Electronic Brains to Everything Machines" (MIT Press, 2025)
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New Books Network
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hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Professor Patrick McCrae about his book titled Read A Bookish History of Computing From Electronic Brains to Everything machines, published by MIT Press in 2025. Now, obviously there are many ways that one could understand a history of where we're at now with computers being everywhere all the time. And often those histories focus on the tech, which is cool, right? Or maybe they focus on some key companies, obviously, like Apple, and that's obviously important too. This book helps us understand that books were also really central to this transformation. And obviously as a host on the New Books Network, how could I not be intrigued? So I learned a ton from this book. I think we're going to learn a lot from the discussion too. Patrick, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Hi Miranda, thanks for having me.
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I'm very pleased that you said yes to this. Could you start us off by introducing yourself a bit and telling us why you decided to write this book? What sorts of questions did you want to tackle? How did this whole project develop?
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So my name is Patrick McCrae. I'm a professor in the History Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I am on leave this academic year at the Library of Congress. So I'm actually spending a year surrounded by books, which is nice. This book was very much a pandemic project. I had finished a previous book project that came out in 2020, and while I was waiting for that book to appear, I was looking for something to do. And I naively thought that writing a book about books could be done without having to spend a ton of time in archives and other places that were off limits due to the pandemic. But that was a mistaken assumption and I had to spend a lot of time actually working with a ton of different primary sources. But my focus was primarily just wanting to write about the history of computing as seen through the lens of several different books, some famous, some not, that had been written about computers computing since the end of the second world War. And that's the project that emerged out of that initial interest.
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Yeah, I think that's a really interesting starting point to think about kind of what books are there. And as you said, some of them are famous, but not all of them. So which books did you decide to focus on, and how did you make this decision?
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Yeah, so, like, I always advise my students, one of the challenges in doing a project is to decide how to draw the box. And there obviously were, you know, I mean, there are literally tens of thousands of books that I could have chosen to work with or selected from. I decided early on that I wanted to only write about nonfiction books. If I had chosen to bring fiction into the picture, I think it would have made certainly for an interesting project, but it also would have probably been a project that I might never have finished. And in order for a book to be read, the author has to finish it. So I focus primarily on nonfiction books. I wanted to have a diversity of books. So some of them are fairly technical. Some of them are written for a popular audience. Some of them were bestsellers. Some of them were pretty obscure. And the other thing, in the process of drawing the box, I can recall one of the people I described this project to early on also asked if I was going to do something with films. And of course, films also, like fiction, would have been an interesting thing to throw into the mix. But again, it would have made the box I was trying to draw that much larger. And I think it also would have diluted the focus of the book. I think if you mix books and films, you're mixing two different genres, and people obviously read books and deal with them cognitively in a different manner than they view a film. So just keeping it to nonfiction books was kind of my way of making this project manageable.
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Yeah. I mean, one has to draw boundaries somehow to be able to go into things. So that makes sense. Now that we have the foundation, I want to dive into some of these books and also some of the authors. Right. Because that's a really key part of this. So, first, looking at Edmund Berkeley, he wrote Giant Brains, which I think is a great title for a book in this sort of field. Can you tell us about him and this book and kind of what the things were that he was bringing together to write this book?
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Sure. So Edmund Berkeley is an American author. He was trained as a mathematician, and when he wrote this book, he was actually working as an actuary for the Prudential Insurance company, which might seem kind of odd, but if One thinks Back to the 1940s, insurance companies were some of the very first early adopters of computing technology because the amounts of information that. That insurance companies had to deal with when dealing with home insurance and life insurance and the fact that more and more Americans were signing up for insurance meant that they had to deal with a very rapidly expanding amount of information. Berkeley was very much intrigued with computing machines. It's something that he worked on for the US Military during the Second World War. And after the war ended, he decided that he wanted to write a popular book that would explain these new giant brains, or electronic brains as they were often referred to at the time. I found that the brain metaphor was sort of an interesting aspect as well. The idea of thinking about a machine that is designed to do computing as akin in some ways to a human brain, but then thinking about how that metaphor or analogy, depending on the degree to which one deploys it, expanded and extended well into the 50s and 60s as we start to get into things like artificial intelligence. So, yeah, Berkeley writes this book. It was not a smash hit, but it also sold pretty well. And it came out in multiple editions and he did okay with it. The thing that was marked for me was the fact that it was the first popular book about computing devices that had been published. So that was sort of my attraction to it. Coupled with the fact that the archive at the University of Minnesota, where Berkeley's papers are, they have a pretty robust collection of his materials. So as a historian, I was drawn to the topic just simply because there was a lot of raw material to work with. His book was interesting. Also, besides explaining how computers worked, he included a couple chapters at the end that talked about their social and moral implications and what they were would possibly be like in the future. So he was one of the first authors to think about how digital computers would be deployed throughout society and also what some of the ethical and moral conundrums associated with that might be.
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Yeah, that's really interesting to see. Kind of already at this stage, so many pieces coming together, right? The sort of big data of the corporate side with insurance. We've got military history, we've got the sort of social implications, a bunch of ideas there. But of course, he's not the only one thinking about and writing about these sorts of topics. Let's add Norbert Wiener. Wiener in. Why? Is he a key figure too?
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Yeah, so Norbert Wiener's famous for writing a trilogy of books dealing with cybernetics, which is the study of the relationship between people and machines. Wiener was noteworthy For a number of reasons. He was a mathematician at mit, so he was writing from a pretty august position. His books about cybernetics, the first one called Cybernetics, the second one called the Human Use of Human Beings, and then a third one which actually won the national book award in 1964. It was published posthumously, called God and Golem Incorporated. All three of them deal with the relationship between people and automated machines, some of which were computers or controlled by computers. And like Edmund Berkeley's book, Wiener was really keen to focus on the social implications of these machines, primarily their use in industrial settings and factories, and the idea of a automated factory and human workers being replaced by machines. Those sorts of concerns which were very prominent in the 1950s and 1960s, but also the military applications of these. Both Berkeley and Wiener were pacifists to varying degrees. Wiener became famous after the Second World War for writing a highly publicized letter that was also endorsed by Albert Einstein that was published in the Atlantic, where he said that he would take no military funding for his research. So he's writing from a particular moral position. And Wiener himself was just an interesting character, very eccentric, very, very given to interesting pronouncements, and probably also a person with a lot of deep seated insecurities and anxieties, again, which made writing about him quite interesting. But basically, he ends up writing a trilogy of books that deal with cybernetics, and at least two of them become surprise bestsellers. It was really interesting to read articles in the New York Times about booksellers who were mystified as to why people were drawn to reading about this obscure combination of engineering and mathematics and computers. Especially his first book, which was full of all sorts of complicated mathematical equations. And yet people still wanted to buy it, partly because I think they believe that they wanted to be up to date on the latest developments in science and technology. So, yeah, definitely an interesting character to write about.
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Yeah, he definitely seemed like a character. So thank you for giving us a sense of that here. When we're talking, then, about being kind of on the cutting edge of up to date of what's happening obviously today that's often generative AI. But you mentioned AI when you were talking about Berkeley, which is obviously a really long time ago in computer terms. So how much was artificial intelligence already part of these 1940s, 1950s debates?
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Yeah, so, I mean, the term artificial intelligence begins to gain traction in public discourse in the mid-1950s. But even with Berkeley's book, you know, this idea that computers might be thought of as akin to the human brain or should we think about computers as being like the human brain? And then of course, you know, what exactly is the human brain? Can we think about the neurons and other physiological parts of our brains and then draw analogies to the circuits and transistors and relays that are in computers? So these were ideas that were common quite early on. But then as we move into the 1950s, when the field of artificial intelligence actually begins to develop as a sort of sub discipline of computer science, those debates never really go away. And there are lots of claims all throughout the late 50s, into the 1960s about what computers could do, what they couldn't do, and lots of hyperbolic statements about what they would be able to do in the future. Sort of what I refer to in my book as sort of subjunctive science using the subjunctive tense text, excuse me, tense of thinking about what computers might be able to do. And of course, a lot of these ideas were breathlessly reported on by journalists, as, you know, basically that these were going to be inevitable developments. And these were claims oftentimes made by computer scientists that many of their fellow computer scientist colleagues found difficult to swallow because they had yet to be proven. They were just simply projections of the present state into the future. But again, this was going back to these questions about what computers could and couldn't do, which is, I guess, an idea that we still very much have with us today.
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Yeah, no, absolutely we do. And we have both the kind of, wow, this is so cool, look what it could lead to. And also the. Hang on, you can't back that up. And even if you could, maybe that wouldn't be a great idea. Right, we still have that as well. So can you tell us more about what the sort of excitement was and the critiques if we move sort of into the mid-1960s?
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Yeah, so part of the critiques were, you know, as you know, it's important to recognize that the field of computer science did not exist in the 1940s, and arguably it didn't really even exist in the 1950s. The first departments of computer science begin to emerge in the late 50s and into the 60s. So in some ways it's a relatively new field. A large part of the debates that were happening again had to do with the relationship between the military and the development of computer technologies. And those links were very robust and went very deep. A lot of the funding, if not the majority of the funding in the United States and I think also in the uk, was tied to the military establishment. So naturally, the sorts of problems that computer engineers and computer scientists worked on were military related, if not directly, then indirectly, and then also tied to that is this debate about not only what computers could and couldn't do, but also as we move into the era of the Vietnam War, of course, which was a very high tech war waged by the United States against an arguably low tech enemy, this idea of what computer scientists as people and as a community should not do and shouldn't do. So again, a lot of these debates about ethics and morality and the degrees to which computer scientists should be willing participants in the arms race, and again, going back to Berkeley and Wiener's ideas about being involved with the defense establishment. So again, we're seeing these debates and conversations still very much with us today. Lots of discussion about Silicon Valley's relationship with the Department of Defense and the relationship of companies like Palantir with the Department of Defense and Homeland Security, and debates that are happening in the United States around immigration. So in some ways this question about what computers could and couldn't and shouldn't do and what computer scientists shouldn't do are still very much with us today.
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Yeah, absolutely. And many of those places, as you mentioned, are key now and then, but there is a section of the book where you do talk about a particular place and its role in this history, especially looking at the rise of personal computing that was so massive and so fast. But the place you focus on is not Silicon Valley, it's not Washington, D.C. why is it Trenton, New Jersey, I
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decided to focus on. So that's a chapter of my book that's about the emergence of personal computing. And I wanted to focus on New Jersey, you know, the Trenton, Princeton area, kind of as a bit of a, as a bit of a whimsy in some ways. You know, so much of our understanding of the history of computing is tied, of course, to places like the Bay Area or the Dallas, Texas area or what have you. And I thought it was just kind of interesting to recover little bits of this lost history. And thinking about New Jersey as a place that was important in some ways in the development of personal computing, I wouldn't say it was essential. And I certainly wouldn't place it on the same level of historical importance as Silicon Valley. But as an author who was looking for an interesting take on the subject and a way of bringing in something that might be surprising to the reader, I wanted to do that and I did that by focusing on a group of teenagers living in Princeton, New Jersey who were members of what I guess we could sort of think of as a extramural science club. And they were active in the New Jersey area in the late 60s into the early 70s. And you know, they weren't working with personal computers as we understand them today, but they were working with a form of personal computing in the sense that they had access to some pretty sophisticated computer hardware, which again, for teenagers was pretty remarkable. And again, thinking about not personal computers as devices and hardware, but to think about personal computing as an activity. And also the other part of that story which made it very attractive to me as an author was their connection with a evangelist for personal computing named Ted Nelson, who went on to write a very influential but oftentimes unknown book called Computer Lib Dream Machines. And Nelson and this group of teenagers knew each other and hung out together, and he was a mentor to them in some ways. So their activities in New Jersey and his writing this book about personal computing was a way of kind of closing that particular circuit and, you know, bringing that story in, you know, telling it in a way that I felt would be both, you know, interesting to me as an author, but also something that would be different for the person picking up this book and reading it, perhaps a story that they were not aware of.
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It definitely was that and I think is really important when we're telling these histories, to look at things that have been told but also haven't been told right. So we don't kind of just end up repeating ourselves and ensure that these sort of other aspects that may have gotten left out to date in the historical record are part of the conversation. And of course that's also something that could be left out in this realm of the expansion of the personal computer. If we focus too much on the devices themselves, or even on, you know, for example, famous TV commercials about these sorts of devices, there's the printed word that is really crucial to this. So can you take us a little bit back into that world?
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I guess I would answer that by kind of thinking about the world of publishing. And you know, I'm an author And I like to write books, which means I have to deal with publishers. And one of my own personal goals in writing this book called readme was for me to learn something about the history of publishing, especially after the Second World War. So that, you know, that was one of my own personal goals. And of course, the history of publishing, like the book itself, is a dynamic subject. It's changing over time. And. And like the book itself, publishing was very much affected by computerization and the adoption of computer technologies in all sorts of ways. And we could say something about that more if you want. But this idea of thinking about the business of publishing. And of course, you know, there are, you know, we can think about books in many ways. We can think of them as, you know, physical objects. We can think of them as a reflection of an author's ideas. But it's also important to remember that they're commodities. They're published by oftentimes large companies that see them as objects to produce and to sell and that they want to make money from. And of course, I think every author in their heart of hearts would like their book to do well and make a little money. Some of the people I wrote about were actually quite explicit about that fact. And one of the things I joke about oftentimes whenever I am giving talks about this particular book is it's not a universal thing, but it's pretty common to find that most authors are pretty unhappy with their publishers. Most authors believe that their publisher could do better and could work a little bit harder and have a more creative marketing plan to help their books get sold. So in thinking about the printed word, that takes us into the business of all of this. And that was certainly an angle that I wanted to make sure that I touched on, that this wasn't just about the history of computing and computers, but I also wanted to say something about the history of books and publishing.
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Yeah, that is a really interesting element to this because of course some of the books do well, sell better than others, but there doesn't seem to be kind of a direct. Or maybe there is a direct line between sort of which ones sell the best versus are sort of the most like, well known in communities that build up around computing.
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I don't think there's a pattern. I mean, the books that I wrote about that were bestsellers, Alvin Toffler's future shock from 1970 is probably a great example of that. I mean, that book sold tremendously well. It made Alvin and Heidi Toffler very, very wealthy. And they then went on to publish some Other well known books, including the Third Wave, which came out in 1980, the Tofflers were, I guess, what we could think of as like pop futurists. It's a very readable book. It also kind of bounces around from topic to topic and all sorts of evidence and examples just being thrown, you know, at the reader at a pretty relentless pace. But the book did surprisingly well. And I find it kind of fascinating that you have the Tofflers who were communists and were active in the Communist party in the 50s and 60s, and then after writing this book, they become quite capitalistic and they become financially very, very successful. And I think the other thing that stood out in writing about that particular book was in reading the correspondence between the Tofflers and their friends and their colleagues and the people they were interviewing. They came across, at least to me, as genuinely nice people. You know, the, the tone of the letters is usually pretty friendly and pretty approachable. And I actually found it quite enjoyable to be, you know, reading through the correspondence that they had with their, their editors and their, their publishers. And then if you jump into the 1990s, I think probably the other book that proved to be a, you know, commercially a bestseller that, you know, made a ton of money. I write about the, the Dummies book series, which I'm sure many of your readers are listeners, excuse me, are familiar with, you know, the Black and Yellow books, you know, Coffee for Dummies, Books for Dummies, whatever. But those books were basically a license to print money for a period of time. I mean, they sold just millions and millions of copies. And the authors of those did pretty well, but the publisher of those books did tremendously well. I mean, they, they made tens and tens of millions of dollars from that, that book series, you know, so those are examples of some of the things that I wrote about that were pretty well known or that most of your listeners would be, would be familiar with. And then, you know, some of the other things I wrote about are probably more obscure.
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Well, maybe we can talk about one aspect that's probably well known in general, but maybe some of the specifics are obscure, which is the sort of communities that come up around these books about computing and computers.
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So I guess the way I would approach that is to think about the way or think about the. If we think about books as tools, I mean, what sorts of things do books do? And they obviously entertain, they inform. But one of the points that I tried to focus on in a couple of my chapters was the idea that books provide a seed, crystal around which communities can form. And that might be a community of people who are developing new ways of using computers for typesetting, or perhaps a community of students who are learning new ways of designing electronic circuits. Or maybe it's a community of people who are trying to learn to use a particular software program. And as I look at my own work, I mean, I've been writing books now for about 25 years, and I've written or edited eight books thus far. If I look at my own books and I try to find a common theme, the idea of what I call technological communities is probably something that I would see as a common theme running through that. This idea of communities of people forming and coalescing around particular technologies. And I like to use the word community as opposed to a discipline or a school or department. I mean, all of these sound a little bit, you know, artificial in nature and a little rigid and static, Whereas community, to me seems to be a more flexible sort of term that, you know, can cross across a lot of different groups of people and is a little bit more inclusive, but, you know, can also expand or contract over time. So that tends to be kind of a unit of analysis, if you will, that I. That I tend to focus on.
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And what were some of the examples you sort of found most interesting to investigate of communities?
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Yeah, well, I have a chapter in the book on two engineers, Lynn Conway and Carver Mead. Lynn Conway, she was an engineer at Xerox, and Carver Mead is a professor of engineering at Caltech. And they co authored a book called, called Introduction to VLSI Systems. VLSI is a technical acronym for Very Large System Integration. But basically it was a textbook for describing a novel way to design electronic circuits. And this book, which they wrote in the late 70s and then it was published in 1980, proved to be a very effective way of getting a new community of electrical engineering students and computer science students to coalesce around this new design paradigm that Conway and Mead were proposing. And the story was attractive to me in many ways, in part because Ling Conway herself was just a fascinating historical character to write about, but also the fact that she set out to write a textbook, which we don't think of normally as revolutionary sorts of books. I mean, textbooks usually contain pretty well accepted knowledge. They're not designed to subvert the existing, you know, paradigm of knowledge that is, you know, in existence at the time. But that was exactly what she set out to do with this book, that she wanted to completely change the way in which chip designers thought about how they went about Designing circuits. And she thought a textbook would be a very good way of bringing about that sort of transformation that she had in mind. So I think that's, you know, probably one of the best examples of a community that I can think of from my own particular book.
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Yeah, I'm really glad you brought up the textbook because as you said, this is not where one would expect kind of cutting edge, pushing the field to come from. So can you tell us more about what she was doing and kind of why through a textbook?
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Yeah, I think she recognized that if you wanted to change the way people thought about designing chips, that, you know, getting, getting that getting to them once they were already out in industry and, you know, had jobs and were working for a particular employer, that that would be a more difficult way. But if you get them when they're young, so to speak, when they're taking their electrical engineering or computer science classes at MIT or Berkeley or Stanford or whatever, and you give them a textbook which offers a new approach to thinking about how chip design could be done, that that would be a way of affecting the transformation that she had in mind. And they were very successful with that model. One could argue that that model has become the way that much of the semiconductor industry is fashion today. I have an anecdote in my book that Morris Chang, who's the founder of the Taiwan Semiconductor Co. TSMC, was very much influenced by their book. And there's this anecdote where he's being interviewed by somebody from the New York Times and he still has a copy of it and shows them the book and is describing why this thing was so influential to them. So I think it says a couple of things that textbooks don't necessarily have to be just tools that they're presenting just simply accepted knowledge, but that also that books have the power to transform and change and cause new communities of knowledge to coalesce and change the ways in which thinking about design and engineering, for example, are done. So again, that made, I thought for a good, the basis of a good chapter for myself.
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Yeah, I mean, it's definitely kind of in this theme of unexpected but important as part of this history. Right. And sort of covering some key aspects. Obviously, you know, Taiwanese built semiconductors, really key part of this, but sort of not from the expected angle. So again, going back to the focusing on New Jersey, not Silicon Valley, I'd love to throw another one in, which is the year 1984. And no, it's not because of the Apple commercial. Right.
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Yeah, that was. Yeah, that's a weird chapter in my book, you know, if you look at the organization of the book, pretty much every chapter is focused on a particular author and a particular book. But by the time I got to the 1980s, I was having a hard time maintaining that focus because there was so much being published and also so much was happening. So I decided, somewhat artificially to structure the chapter, which was focused around 1984, around. Well, just around things that were happening roughly in that time frame. So it's not just the famous Apple Computer advertisement, which if your listeners haven't. Haven't seen, I would really encourage them to look up that and watch it on YouTube because it's absolutely fascinating. But I was also writing about the fact that it was in the early 1980s that the, you know, average American or British reader was beginning to learn about this place called Silicon Valley. And I argue that one of the ways that people learned about this emerging region was through books. But I also wanted to write about not just books, but also about kinds of authors. So I used this chapter to write about the emergence of the technology journalist, a type of person that we have very much with us today. I mean, I was just looking at the page, the webpage for the Wall Street Journal, and, you know, I imagine that there are scores of reporters employed by the Wall Street Journal who focus on technology. They might just focus on one particular company, even. But this idea of a technology journalist is a relatively recent invention, and one could argue that it really only begins to emerge as a specific genre of writing in the early 1980s. So I write about people like Evelyn Richards, who was a business writer and technology journalist writing for the San Jose Mercury News. I write about another author named Michael Malone, who was also a journalist, but then went on to write a book, sort of one of the first sort of detailed exposes about Silicon Valley called the Big Score, where he focused on some of the positive aspects of that region. But he also didn't shy away from discussing economic inequality and the environmental impact of some of the industries in the region. So these were two things that I wanted to focus on. And this is all sort of happening against the backdrop of the widespread adoption of the personal computer, something that's being used in a widespread way, not just in industry and in the office, but people are bringing these devices into their homes and into their kitchens and setting them up and trying to learn how to work with them. So structuring this chapter around 1984 kind of allowed me to do all those different things and touch on all of these different topics without focusing specifically on one particular author and one particular book.
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Yeah, that makes a lot of sense from a kind of how to explore the period point of view. And as you said, of course, this whole area of writing about technology has massively changed now by now, but also even, you know, by the sort of 1990s, like, if we compare from that point of personal computers being way more ubiquitous, there being technology reporters as a category, these companies have become sort of name brands back to where we started with, you know, Edmund Berkeley, which was definitely not the case there. What were books kind of trying to go, hey, general public person, you want to learn about computers? That genre existed in both sorts of times, but inside the books, they were pretty different, right?
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B
I mean, a couple of things are happening. I mean, one of the things I find interesting is that as we move into the 1990s, the computer itself kind of does a bit of a disappearing act, if you will. And one of the, you know, metrics, if you will, that I, you know, describe in my own book about this is just to look simply at the covers of Time magazine, you know, which is a pretty, you know, certainly an imperfect way of gauging things, but it does offer a bit of a picture in terms of what people are thinking about. And as you go from the 1980s, you know, when computers or anything computer related is on the COVID of Time, it's usually the machines themselves or the entrepreneurs who are all, you know, white dudes associated with it. But as we move into the 1990s, the computer itself becomes less and less common or less and less the focus. And not surprisingly, it becomes the Internet and the World Wide Web and various software applications, and of course, the relentless focus on white guys as entrepreneurs. That thing doesn't change, unfortunately. But the computer itself, the hardware, begins to kind of fade into the background and people begin to think more and more about what they can do with it. And of course, accessing what at the time was commonly referred to as cyberspace becomes very much the focus. And that's also where some of the books that I chose to focus on for the 1990s, where they're situated. So, for example, I write about the whole Internet catalog, which was a book that appeared in 1991. And it was basically a way of describing. Describing what the Internet was for. People who didn't know what this thing was, they might have heard about it or maybe had seen, like, some sort of weird thing written down that had the ampersand or AT symbol in it. And, you know, again, if you go online, you can find all sorts of wonderful YouTube videos from the early 1990s of news anchors, you know, befuddled and asking themselves, you know, what is Internet? And trying to figure this out. And this book was an attempt to explain what the Internet was, but also how people could access it and what they could do with it. And then in a way that is very reflective of the state of the Internet in the early 90s, it actually provided a list at the end of several hundred websites, because it was a time when you could actually list the websites that were available, and it provided the addresses or the URLs for people to go and look at these particular things. Then, of course, as we move through the 1990s, maintaining such an atlas like that becomes increasingly more and more difficult. But again, this was a way of explaining the Internet for someone who was interested and they heard about it, and the best way that they could learn about it. Because if you don't know what the Internet is, you can't go online to look stuff up. The way they would learn about it would be through a book. And I guess I just found that rather fascinating, this idea of one form of information technology being used to explain another. And again, I think that's kind of one of the sub themes, if you will, throughout my whole book is to think about computers, obviously, as a form of information technology. But then you have the world's oldest form of information technology, the book itself, being used to explain and describe it. So it was kind of those parallel tracks that I was interested in mapping in my chapter on the 1990s. And of course, all sorts of other things are happening in the 1990s as well. I mean, you have the Internet itself becoming commercialized, and you have the emergence of what sociologists might call cyber libertarianism, this sort of melding of libertarian beliefs with this emancipatory power of technology, which today, of course, has coalesced into something a lot less pleasant. But we can see the seeds of that in the 1990s, for example. So that was kind of the focus of that particular chapter.
- [39:20]
C
Yeah, no, that definitely makes sense. And as you said, it kind of brings together many of the themes that we've been discussing throughout talking about the whole book. So is there anything further about this book that we want to bring into our discussion before we wrap it up?
- [39:33]
B
Well, I think, you know, the time it takes to publish a book is rather considerable. So I finished drafting this book in the. Let's see. Try to remember my years here. I finished the rough draft for it in the fall of 2024. And then I had to make revisions on it going into 2025. In the epilogue or final chapter of the book, I spent some time talking about generative AI and large language models and things like that. Of course, adding caveats all throughout that chapter that, you know. Dear reader, by the time you are reading this, a lot of what I'm saying will probably be old news or will be proven wrong. But the point that I wanted to make with that epilogue was the idea, which sounds kind of absurd, or would have sounded absurd when I started this project, but doesn't sound absurd now, is to tell the reader that everything that is in my book I wrote myself. I didn't rely on a AI product to do it for me. And just the fact that I had to include that note in my own book, I found rather remarkable. So I used the epilogue to reflect upon the idea of the computer itself as an author. So in some ways I thought was a very interesting way to finish my own book about books about computing was to think about how books and computing and authorship had become so inextricably woven together. So whether it's the possibility of a computer being an author, which can certainly be the case now, although of debatable quality and veracity, there's that. But then if we think also about how tools that we use, like the webpage for Amazon, how this shapes book buying habits, but also book reading habits, if we think about how algorithms suggest books to us to read, I just an hour ago bought a book on Amazon, and of course it suggested, oh, you're buying such and such. You might also be interested in these things, you know, 90% of which are completely ludicrous. It's like, well, you know, just because I bought a book on fly fishing doesn't really tell me that I want to buy a pasta maker. But, you know, it's an imperfect algorithm, but it's certainly shaping, you know, not just the ways in which we write books, but the ways in which we consume them and learn about them and purchase them. So, again, that was something that I used the epilogue was to. To focus on that. But again, reflecting upon the idea of, you know, myself as a very human author and, you know, what. What that actually meant in, you know, in 2026.
- [42:25]
C
Yeah, I mean, I think that's something we're all going to continue to reflect on. So can I ask what you might be working on now that this book is done? If there's anything you currently want to give us a sneak preview of?
- [42:35]
B
Yeah, so I have a very Short attention span I like to use. So first of all, I like to write books. It's probably the best part of my job. I like to use books as a way of making myself learn about a new topic. So I knew a fair amount about the history of computing, but I was by no means a computer historian. So writing this book called readme was a way of, you know, a process of encouraging a certain amount of self education on my part. The book that I wrote before this was about engineers and artists working together in the 1960s and 1970s. And I used that as a way of learning about modern art. And it was very productive for me and in many ways is one of my favorite books that I've done in terms of what I'm doing now. I have a project that I'm doing with a couple colleagues around the idea of habitability and thinking about habitability as it's seen through the lens of extreme environments and thinking about its relationship to astrobiology and life on other planets or the possibility thereof. So that's one thing that I'm doing while I'm based at the Library of Congress as the Kluge Chair in Technology and Society this year. So that's a wonderful opportunity. And I've also become increasingly interested in the field of environmental history. And I have a new project that I am slowly starting to work on that is looking at the confluence of outdoor recreation in the 19th and 20th centuries with natural history. So how are people who are spending a lot of time outdoors hunting or fishing or mountaineering also contributing to the production of scientific knowledge? So those are the two main things that I'm working on. And then like every book project, there are always what I call orphans. There are the topics and things that I wanted to put in the book that I had to leave out for reasons of space or narrative or what have you. And, you know. So there are a couple side projects related to things that are in the readme book that just simply didn't make it between the covers and that maybe I'll do something with down the road.
- [44:54]
C
Well, plenty then to keep you busy and interested. So best of luck with all of those projects. And of course, while you are pursuing them at the gorgeous Library of Congress, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled Read A Bookish History of Computing From Electronic Brains to Everything Machines, published by MIT Press in 2025. Patrick, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [45:17]
B
Of course.
- [45:18]
C
Thank you, Miranda.