The names resonate along the pathways of my memory: Wilkes, von Neumann, Eckert and Mauchly, Sammet, and dozens of others from the early years of the computer industry, and indeed the early years of computer design, who inhabit this book. Here we have a reference book, not a memoir or a popularization. Norberg, the author, is a professor in the computer science department at the University of Minnesota, and is the director of the Charles Babbage Institute for the History of Information and Technology. Norberg has written detailed case studies of two companies who played major if fleeting roles in the commercialization of the first generation of computers. What sounds like a narrow topic is actually a platform from which to present glimpses of the major projects and events that breathed life and energy into those new babies. The companies are Engineering Research and Analysis and the Eckert and Mauchly Computer Company, both later acquired by Remington Rand, a story also told in this book.

Norberg provides details on both the technical and the business issues faced by the first computer manufacturers. On the technical side, he recounts progress on specific projects, down to the level of individual design alternatives tested. On the business side, he lets us in on the opportunities won and lost, the dynamics of the companies, and their (mis)fortunes as subsidiaries of Remington Rand. While not thrilling literature, Norberg’s work has definitely shed new light on a time of great ferment, when the fundamental nature of the computer was shaped, when government contracts were the only real bread and butter for companies, when software was free and open source (yes, everything old is new again), and when companies as small as these two were competing toe to toe with the likes of IBM, on the basis of fundamental new technology that might be invented by any of them at a lab bench, for prominence in the nascent computer industry.