Giant Brains; or, Machines That Think (1949) is the first popular book about computers, written while the machines still filled rooms and had names like ENIAC. Edmund Berkeley explains, for readers who had never seen one, what these ‘mechanical brains’ are, how relays and vacuum tubes handle information, and — with startling foresight — what thinking machines might come to mean for society.
Berkeley predicted personal machines, automation anxieties and much else; reading him now is like finding the computer age’s birth announcement. Download the free EPUB and meet the future at the moment it switched on.