Cyber Castoffs

Remember desks without computers? A new book of graphics charts the computer’s evolution beginning in 1837, when Charles Babbage and Augusta Ada King, wife of Lord Byron, invented the “Analytical Engine,” notes Steven Heller in the introduction. The book continues through 1945—“when the first atomic bomb blast went off in Alamogordo, New Mexico … the impossible became possible, and a once far-reaching scientific concept became a cold, hard reality,” writes the book’s editor, Ryan Mungia—and on into the 1990s. Technology has continued to get better and faster, but the fears we associate with it remain familiar, in many ways unchanged in the years since Danny Hillis’s 1999 Newsweek article underscored our angst: “We are back in the jungle, only this time it is a jungle of our own creation…. There are no real experts, only people who understand their own little pieces of the puzzle. The big picture is a mystery to us, and the big picture is that nobody knows.” —Julia Vitale