This is a biography. It’s about a computing person you likely have never heard of. But like him or loathe him or don’t care about him, he is probably one of the most visible and intriguing people to ever enter the computing field.

Professionally, he was a computing pioneering practitioner, spending a considerable amount of time in the insurance business. But that’s not what made him visible. He also published, for many years starting in 1953, a journal called Computers and Automation (which later morphed around 1974 into Computers and People). And that made him somewhat more visible. But Berkeley is best known for his support for peace initiatives, his opposition to anything to do with supporting war, and his outspoken vocalization on those issues. For that, Berkeley was so well known in computing circles that when he got up to speak, a significant portion of his audience would leave in protest!

Much of this book is about this latter period of his life. There is so little about his personal life that his divorce is mentioned in passing as if it wasn’t important, even when it happened in the same year (1948) he was leaving the insurance business to strike out as a consultant on his own.

The book also fails to mention the existence of his latter-day publication Computers and People, focusing instead on its initial name. That seems odd, since in many ways the “People” part of its title says more about what Berkeley was about than “Automation” does.

But the book is enormously thorough about what made Berkeley so controversial. It spends many pages on the ways he sought to oppose war, especially opposing those who worked in the computing parts of the defense industry, and the number of folks who fought him over those issues (I worked in the US aerospace industry, and I definitely did not agree with those controversial stances of his). For example, he was under investigation for some time as a communist sympathizer, and the book elaborates on that enormously. (At one point early in his life, he saw a world future in which the best of socialism and capitalism could somehow combine successfully.)

He was in the US Navy during World War II, and as the war reached its end he analyzed what he might do with the rest of his life. Seeing himself as a poor manager (the book spends some time describing his work conflicts with supervisors, noting that at one point in his career he reached an “impasse” with them), he envisioned “writing, speaking, and working in the subjects in which [he was] most interested: mathematics, economics, sociology, labor, politics.”

He was quite successful in meeting those aims. His first notable work was a book putting the subject of computing into terms the average person could understand. It was called Giant brains and was considerably acclaimed in its time, although it was faulted for perhaps going too far in anthropomorphizing computers.

He was also instrumental in the steps taken to form the Association for Computing Machinery, which persists to this day through its acronym ACM as the predominant society for computing people. And of course his publishing activities were yet another instantiation of his doing what he had set out to do.

What of the book itself? It’s occasionally hard to understand; for example, “Prudential statistical personnel accounted for 400,000 New Jersey registered voters, enabling them to cast absentee ballots in the 1944 presidential election.” (Since when does someone in New Jersey need to cast an absentee ballot?) It also is organized by topic, rather than by chronology, which means the reader must tolerate a considerable amount of jumping back and forth in time.

So in the end, who was Edmund Berkeley? “A man of ideas, of dreams, applied imagination ... and his own man ... a rare individual.” Those are quotes from his contemporaries, the people who knew him best.

(Truth in reviewing probably requires me to say that my article “Computers Enter the Busing Controversy,” about the use of computing for busing for school integration, won Berkeley’s Computers and Automation Martin Luther King award in 1971.)