The Origins of Cyberspace

Hugh Pagan, 01 June 2003 - [ E-mail a Friend ]

Origins of cyberspace. A library on the history of computing, networking, and telecommunications. By DIANA H.HOOK and JEREMY M. NORMAN. With contributions by MICHAEL R.WILLIAMS. Novato, California, historyofscience.com, 2002.
4to. x + (2) + 670 + (2)pp, numerous illustrations. Publisher's cloth. Edition of 500 copies, price $500, available from orders@jnorman.com.

This very impressive volume, describing the collection of 1410 printed and manuscript items on the history of computing assembled by Jeremy Norman between 1996 and 2001, is both an achievement in itself and the foundation stone on which all subsequent bibliographical surveys of the historical literature of computing will be founded. Here will be found all the high spots of the older literature on mathematical calculating machines, from Napier's Rabdologia onwards, with full representation and discussion of publications by Charles Babbage, and many less familiar books and pamphlets documenting the use of punched-card calculating machines and the like by businesses and government agencies from the late nineteenth century to the Second World War. These are however merely a preface to a truly awesome assemblage of material, amounting to nearly a thousand distinct items, recording the development of computer systems from the time that the world's first electronic digital computer was completed and tested in the USA in the spring of 1945 to a date in the early 1960s when the pioneering phase of systems design drew to a close.

Central to this latter part of the collection are the papers of J.Presper Eckert, chief designer and engineer of the ENIAC computer of 1945 which was the precursor of all subsequent machines for electronic computing. But these by no means stand on their own, for Norman has been assiduous in assembling contemporary publications by other American computer pioneers and also by such influential British theoreticians as Alan Turing and Sir Maurice Wilkes.

As a catalogue of a field of literature never before treated as a whole and with such expertise, it can safely be asserted that it will not easily be supplanted either as a work of bibliographical reference or as a very readable guide to the history of the development of computer systems. It is altogether proper that if any one was to put such a collection together, it should have been Jeremy Norman, a bookseller operating closer than most of us to Silicon Valley and to other citadels of the new age of information technology, and he and his co-author deserve every praise both for the remarkable coherence of the collection and for the skill and elegance with which this volume has been compiled and printed.

From a British perspective it is however just worth stressing, before human memory fades, that although Norman had himself previously put together a collection of antiquarian books on the history of computing, the first booksellers who seem to have put together collections whose scope extended into the computer literature of the post-war world were two North London booksellers, Graham Weiner (as acknowledged by Norman on p.x) and the late Ben Weinreb (see Norman's footnote 13 on p.8). As to Ben Weinreb, Norman rightly remarks that Weinreb's collection, sold by Bloomsbury Book Auctions in a 425 lot sale in October 1999, contained "much bulky documentation of little or no collector's value"; but this is a little unfair to Weinreb, for the core of his collection had been put together with the help and advice of an expert in the field, Anthony Chandor (who also happened to be the father-in-law of the London bookseller Charles Russell), and it was only Weinreb's subsequent decision to add less significant material in order to increase the number of titles in the collection - a habitual Weinreb ploy - that spoiled its ultimate balance.