Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe (original 2012; edition 2012)

Couldn't get into it - the style of writing was very irritating. Gave up after 3 chapters. ( )

Meandering and portentous but very much worth reading… ( )

Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe
George Dyson
April 1, 2013

George Dyson is interestingly the son of Freeman Dyson, who was part of the events chronicled in the book. The author describes the creation of the first electronic computer, the MANIAC, at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton, starting in 1949 and completing in 1953. The impresario of the project was John von Neumann, who gathered engineers to build the computer and helped to design the first programming language. Much of the impetus for the computer was to complete calculations for the hydrogen bomb, then in development. The mathematicians and physicists involved were mostly also involved in the atomic bomb project in Los Alamos. The computer used vacuum tubes, and the filament heaters consumed several kilowatts of power, and the air conditioning to keep the apparatus cool also used gross amounts of power, often icing over in the humidity. The memory was about 5 kilobytes, stored in Williams' cathode-ray storage tubes (the persistent phosphor glow allowed bits to be retained, and read out by the electron beam). The engineers were the first to develop a command line, and read instructions into the machine with paper tape, later punch cards. The input and output followed the same patterns as earlier special purpose machines like those at Bletchely Park in England during WWII, and ENIAC created for calculating artillery tables. This is a fascinating time in engineering history, but the story is very liberally padded with irrelevant information, like the history of Princeton in Indian and Colonial times. Dyson at times speculates about the "digital universe" and its relationship to human thought: "With our cooperation, self-reproducing numbers are exercising increasingly detailed and far-reaching control over the conditions in our universe that make life more comfortable in theirs". "The paradox of artificial intelligence is that any system simple enough to understand is not complicated enough to behave intelligently, and any system complicated enough to behave intelligently is not simple enough to understand." It is interesting that random searches may be more efficient on large machines than encoding a solution to a problem, and by looking through the number of solutions that have already been encoded in the digital universe, it may be easier to find answers. "In 2010 you could buy a computer with over a billion transistors for the inflation adjusted cost of a transistor radio in 1956" ( )

I was drawn to this book by its title & cover design. "Turing" in the title plus the punched cover directly meant (at least in my own mind) that it was about Alan Turing and the Universal machine.
Before this book I knew little about Turing's universal machine and the origins of the computer. I knew about Von Neumann only by the name.

After reading this book, I got more interested about computers. I now have an awareness about how powerful the computer is (especially in our times) and how inefficient we (or at least me) are using it. Now I know the origins of the ENIAC, MANIAC & their derivatives. Know I know what an "app" was like in the 1950's.

Turing's Cathedral (still not sure why "Cathedral"!; maybe referring to the computer as the cathedral?) is an exciting read especially for the computer enthusiast, mathematicians, physicists, and scientists in general. It is eloquently written and describes things in details.

What I liked most about it is that it has references to actual scientific papers written the creators of the computer. As a matter of fact I have selected a couple of papers too read.

I finished the book without even knowing it. It suddenly stops without prior notice, as if there is a continuation that has been cut.

I really enjoyed reading this book and recommend it for everyone, literally everyone. ( )

Starts with a brief intro to one of the first digital computers but then goes into a long history of the founding of the Institute for Advanced Study.