Nerds' triumph

摘要

Spare a thought for the computer historian. Most subjects ebb and flow, rise and fall, leaving the tracings on which history's tales are told. But computing just seems to explode. Who cares, in mid-blast, how the bomb was made? At the end of his excellent history of the computer, Paul Ce-ruzzi suddenly arrives at the same realisation. The Internet boom has seemingly eclipsed all the computing that came before it. Perhaps, he muses, that day in 1994 when Netscape went public and doubled its worth overnight, sparking the "dotcom" euphoria that still drives much of the American stock market boom today, marked the real beginning of computing history. Perhaps everything that went before—his whole book, in other words—was just "prelude". Has he written a history of the internal combustion engine when he should have done the car?