The Discrete Charm of the Machine: Why the World Became Digital

Steiglitz (Snipers, Shills, and Sharks: eBay and Human Behavior), professor emeritus of computer science at Princeton, falls far short of his stated goal—explaining the development of “devices that store and manipulate information in the form of discrete bits” in a manner accessible to technically untrained readers. Instead, Steiglitz offers a jargon-laced and sometimes eccentric history of the computer that will confound even those with some scientific literacy. His opening section summarizing the material he will cover is much clearer than anything that follows—he refers to “physical obstacles to reliable computation” and how these challenges are overcome digitally; how ideas that emerged from communication studies, rather than physics, yielded “high-speed networking and the internet”; and what the full potential of quantum computing might be. But even here, with an unexplained reference to “an NP-complete problem,” Steiglitz betrays his disconnect from his intended audience. And that divergence only grows, through complex diagrams, and obscure phrasing (“every time we multiply a sinusoid by an additional sinusoid, we double the number of frequencies in the signal”). The bizarre epilogue, an imagined intercepted alien message, also fails to render complex concepts more relatable. A more stringent editorial hand might have made Steiglitz’s undoubted expertise in his subject genuinely accessible to layreaders. (Feb.)