Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Creating the Digital Revolution [Book Review]

The book begins with Ada, Countess of Lovelace, Lord Byron’s mathematically gifted daughter, and with her role in first translating, and then significantly embellishing, notes on the workings of Charles Babbage’s analytical engine, arguably the first design of a general purpose computer. Interestingly, for a book that focuses on the innovators behind the development of digital age technology, this is the only chapter to bear the name of an innovator, instead of an innovation. That does not diminish what it is in this text that is very welcome. All too often overlooked, the inclusion of people less well known in the popular understanding of the history of the computer is a valuable contribution. However, for a text that purportedly focuses on the innovators, there is too little exploration of the “why”: Why these particular people? Throughout the work, despite the title, it is clear that the advance of the technology is the driving factor behind the narrative, more than the people behind the innovation. While it is true that there are instances where the key innovator directly influenced the nature and direction of the technological development, it is equally true that for other developments, including the computer itself, it is not so clear that the history rests with a single individual, and a book myopically focused on this one mechanism to tell the story of technology seems to, at best, create problems in telling a coherent story. At the same time, there are many different pathways to the discovery of new information, and those that are drawn to the stories of people and personalities can use this text as a way to discover the interesting development of the computer as the ubiquitous information machine that continues to shape our lives.