Everything has a beginning. None was more profound—and quite as unexpected—than Information Technology. Here for the first time is the untold story of how our new age came to be and the bright boys who made it happen. What began on the bare floor of an old laundry building eventually grew to rival in size the Manhattan Project. The unexpected consequence of that journey was huge---what we now know as Information Technology.
For sixty years the bright boys have been totally anonymous while their achievements have become a way of life for all of us. “Bright Boys” brings them home. By 1950 they’d built the world’s first real-time computer. Three years later they one-upped themselves when they switched on the world’s first digital network. In 1953 their work was met with incredulity and completely overlooked. By 1968 their work was gospel. Today, it’s the way of the world. Special Foreword by Jay W. Forrester Includes notes by chapter, bibliography, index, and portfolio of archival photography.
Tom Green talks about his book in a recent video available on YouTube.
Reviews
It is a fascinating and easy read, and the photographs on the dust cover and throughout the book are used with excellent effect and add to the reader’s feel for the time and place. … the book goes well beyond describing the Whirlwind creators. … I recommend Bright Boys to anyone who wants to begin to understand where some of modern computing came from before the Internet era. I also recommend taking a look at the book’s website before or while reading the book. Perhaps as it did with me, the book will leave you wanting to know more.
—IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2011
A+: This is how a computer history book should be written. It’s an amazing history of MIT in the 1940s and 1950s around the invention of the computer. Some other places place an ancillary role (like the Moore School at U Penn and Harvard), bud Cambridge are front and center.
—Technology Review, May 2010
Bright Boys cuts right to the heart of how complex technologic systems are conceived, incubated, and grown across generations. Tom's clever writing style draws a reader into the story and the remarkable depth and breadth of his research holds the reader firm, often enthralled, throughout. This is a remarkable case study of the birth and development of a technological system that indispensably beats as the heart of the economy, communications, transportation, and culture- circulating life's blood of information around the globe in the blink of an eye.
—Dik Daso, Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum
A fascinating story of how it felt to be present at the creation of the Information Age, at a time when, as the author says, there was less than a megabyte of computer memory on the whole planet.
—Paul E. Ceruzzi Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum
