Book Review: Turing's Cathedral

Last month for book club we read Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson. It's basically a history of the invention of the digital computer. To be honest I thought the book (not the subject) was pretty awful. It was tough to read and there were a lot of tangents, and unrelated information. It was sort of all over the place, and for no reason. One of the members in my book club (after watching an interview) even thought the author George Dyson, might even have a learning impediment. But I did still manage to take away a few interesting points. The first is that I didn't realize how much of our technology came about because of military projects. Computers and then the Internet etc, all of that came from military programs and research. The digital computer was invented to help calculate blast radius of hypothetical nuclear explosions, and to decode encrypted German messages. Crazy hu? It's interesting to note too that when the military "declassified" information the technology it became available to everyone, whereas if the Internet,or computers would have been invented by a private company, they would have had a monopoly and control,and things would be very different (much more expensive) now I think. So that's one cool thing about it all coming from where it did.

The other thing I thought that was interesting albeit sad, was the tragic end of Alan Turing himself. Apparently despite his genius, and his contributions as a mathematician and scientist the thing that most people of his day remembered him for was the fact that he was gay. In the 1950's in Britain, being gay was actually illegal. So he was stripped of his security clearance, kicked off his job and humiliated, and given the choice between the spending the rest of his life in prison or being chemically castrated. He chose the latter. Two years later he committed suicide. 

It makes me angry that his sexual orientation was allowed to overshadow everything else in his life including his professional and scientific accomplishments. It's so ridiculous. Look at all the progress he made, who cares if he's gay? In a way I feel like we've come a long way form those times, but then just last week, I saw all this stuff about the CEO of Chick-fil-A being anti-gay marriage, and I think to myself WTF? Why is this still an issue? Sigh...

Anyway, like I said, the book itself wasn't great, and I wouldn't recommend it really, but at the same time, it was a good starting point to learn something interesting about how our good old PC's came about.