Most of this review is going to be a criticism of this book. So let me say this at the outset: go and buy this book, and keep it in your reference library! It’s an excellent source for answering questions of the form “Whatever happened to ... ?” And while you’re at it, buy its companion volume, Giants of computing, which is to the famous people of our field what this book is to its famous companies (but beware: I have not read Giants, so this may be an overly optimistic recommendation).

Now, let’s get on with what’s wrong with this book (and bear in mind that, as a grizzly and grey-haired veteran of the software field, I like to complain about the ways in which computing historians give short shrift to some of its most important topics).

It leaves out far too many important topics:

1. It says that digital computers are binary, neglecting such things as the bi-quinary IBM 650 (which it does discuss, but never mentioning its odd bit structure) or, most importantly, the whole line of decimal (yes, decimal!) computers IBM produced for business data processing applications (I’m beginning to think IBM is embarrassed at having produced such products, since they are rarely mentioned in any history of the field I have seen).

2. It never mentions the extremely important unbundling that IBM was required to do: it had previously been giving software away with its hardware products, and was thenceforth required by the US Department of Justice to price software separately. This was the beginning of software becoming a product of its own, and it is hard to imagine leaving out such a monumental event (while mentioning the less important “browser wars” case between Microsoft and Netscape not once, but twice).

3. It develops a lot of material on various operating systems such as Windows and Unix, but spends no space whatsoever on OS/360, the (perhaps misbegotten) operating system without which the milestone IBM 360 product line could not have succeeded.

4. There is a lot mentioned about clones, but mostly with respect to the personal computer, and (except for a discussion of Amdahl) virtually nothing on those IBM 360 clones (cloner RCA, for example, is not mentioned at all).

5. There is no chapter devoted to Lenovo, although the company is mentioned in several places discussing the products of other companies. There is no mention that GE was once in the computing business (it was, of course, one of the “seven dwarfs,” and there is no mention of “Snow White (= IBM) and the Seven Dwarfs,” either), and GE was, in fact, a pioneer of time-sharing computers (of which there is no mention, either). There is no mention of Xerox, another Dwarf, although there is a lengthy discussion of its subdivision Xerox PARC. There is also no mention of RadioShack, although a company that produced a product known colloquially as the “Trash-80” perhaps does not deserve mention.

6. There is no mention of the “spreadsheet,” neither in the index nor the table of contents. How can the product that facilitated most of the early sales of the PC not be mentioned?

There is also surprising redundancy. The redundancy between the Amdahl and IBM sections is perhaps forgivable, but the redundancy between Microsoft and Netscape on the “browser wars,” where two whole paragraphs are repeated verbatim, is inexcusable.

So why do I like this book, given its many and glaring flaws? Because the history of computing is fast slipping into the all-too-distant past, where it will be all-too-easily forgotten. We need books like this to remind us of how phenomenal our field really is.