This beautiful pictorial history of computing will delight a child and bring a fresh sense of wonder to an adult. This is no ordinary book; it contains three levels of communication: (1) beautiful color photographs; (2) the “thread”--a red line with large-print text connecting the ideas from page to page; and (3) the printed text--simple, yet expressing deep thoughts.

The book is short (112 pages), and would be equally at home on a coffee table, in a child’s library, or on the bookshelf of a thinker. It begins with the counting of pebbles for ballots in the Athenian democracy and ends with the limits of Quantum Theory in which the pebble and the hand holding it become one. I recommend it to the reader.