On 2008-09-24 Sam Adams, Minnesota. USA wrote:
This book (first published in 1985 with an afterward by Rheingold written for the 2000 MIT Press edition) is not about the history or development of computers or the history of electronics concurrent with the history of computers. It is not about computer design, computer hardware, computer architecture, computer programming, or computer software. It is about a selected few people in the history of computers and how amazing Rheingold thinks they and their ideas were. Only incidentally, and rarely, do we learn anything about what computers were like during the period these people were active or influential. This is a book written by a cheerleader. Rheingold is more interested in waving his pom-poms than allowing us to see the background details for what all his cheering is about.
His divides his team into three groups and lists them in chapter one:
Patriarchs - Charles Babbage, George Boole, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon.
Pioneers - J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Taylor, Alan Kay.
Infonauts - Avron Barr, Brenda Laurel, Ted Nelson.
From Babbage to Shannon the book kept my interest. But in later chapters its lack of detail and incessant cheerleading diminishes the value of the book. Overall the book is superficial. It came out at the mid-point of the 1980s, when the computer was on everyone´s mind with the advent of the IBM PC (1981) and the Apple Macintosh (1984). The interest was in this new age of ´mind tools´ and how science-fictiony and cool the future was going to be, and how the computer was going to ´augment´ our mind and make us all really, really smart and efficient. Rheingold seems to see the computer as becoming the technological analogue of the 1960s counterculture´s ´mind expanding drug´ without the bad trips of the chemical originals.
Rheingold says in his 2000 Preface that the book was written in 1983, although he squeezed in a couple sentences mentioning the Macintosh: on page 207 in reference to the PARC Alto, and on page 229 in reference to the earlier PARC inspired Apple Lisa.
Curiously, in a book with the subtitle of ´The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology´, Rheingold never discusses the actual applications of this new technology and how indeed the computer has made an extraordinary difference. He is silent on this even in the 2000 Afterward, where he could have discussed the advances made since the initial publication of the book and could have imagined future ´mind-expanding´ applications. He refers to the Internet, but of course by 2000 that was the Really Big Deal in the use of computers. But even there he has nothing of interest to say.
. And summed up by saying Tools for Thought. Currently Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology has an overall rating of 8 over 10.
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The MIT Press claimed ´. . . a special book, one of the best histories yet.´ -- Personal Computing ´A solid read.´ -- Washington Post The digital revolution did not begin with the teenage millionaires of Silicon Valley, claims Howard Rheingold, but with such early intellectual giants as Charles Babbage, George Boole, and John von Neumann. In a highly engaging style, Rheingold tells the story of what he calls the patriarchs, pioneers, and infonauts of the computer, focusing in particular on such pioneers as J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Bob Taylor, and Alan Kay. Taking the reader step by step from nineteenth-century mathematics to contemporary computing, he introduces a fascinating collection of eccentrics, mavericks, geniuses, and visionaries. The book was originally published in 1985, and Rheingold´s attempt to envision computing in the 1990s turns out to have been remarkably prescient. This edition contains an afterword, in which Rheingold interviews some of the pioneers discussed in the book. As an exercise in what he calls ´retrospective futurism,´ Rheingold also looks back at how he looked forward. More about this book
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