Prologue
Look around you. Computers and networks are everywhere, enabling an intricate web of complex human activities: education, commerce, entertainment, research, manufacturing, health management, human communication, even war. Of the two main technological underpinnings of this amazing proliferation, one is obvious: the breathtaking pace with which advances in microelectronics and chip design have been bringing us faster and faster hardware.
This book tells the story of the other intellectual enterprise that is crucially fueling the computer revolution:
Books and algorithms
Two ideas changed the world. In 1448 in the German city of Mainz a goldsmith named Johann Gutenberg discovered a way to print books by putting together movable metallic pieces. Literacy spread, the Dark Ages ended, the human intellect was liberated, science and technology triumphed, the Industrial Revolution happened. Many historians say we owe all this to typography. Imagine a world in which only an elite could read these lines! But others insist that the key development was not typography, but algorithms....