IP: DARWIN AMONG THE MACHINES

[David Farber <farber () cis upenn edu>]

Date: Fri, 23 May 97 14:02:26 PDT
From: "Willis H. Ware" <willis () rand org>



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Folder: YES

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Paul Armer circulated news of this book to a few people, but I think not to
the entire list.  Author is George Dyson, brother of Esther Dyson of
Eduventure (venture capital), and son of Freeman Dyson.  Paul Baran wrote an
elegant review of it and was glowing in his response to the historical
accuracy, interpretation, etc. of the author's work.  Excerpt below.


Subtitle is "evolution of global intelligence" and it treats the early
history of the Princeton machine family in some details, plus a lot of
later material about Rand, Paul Baran, etc.  Publisher:  Addison Wesley.


Just at a quick glance through the index, one finds:


    AN-FSQ 7
    Argonne National Lab
    Babbage
    Baran, Paul
    Edmund Berkley
    Julian Bigelow
    Frank Collbohm
    Compleat Strategyst
    Defense Calculator (701)
    ENIAC
    Fortran
    Gunning, William F.
    Internet (at Rand)
    Johnniac
    Los Alamos
    Metropolis, Nicholas
    Million Random Digits
    Packet swithing
    Preliminary Design of an Earth-Circling Spaceship
    RAND Corp
    SDC
    Selectron memory
    Turing, Alan
    von Neumann, John
    Ware, Willis H.
    Williams Tube Memory
    Zworykin, Vladimir


and hundreds of other entries that will be familiar to old timers in the
business and in early AEC activities.


Excerpt from Paul Baran msg to publisher:


"It is a remarkable work of true scholarship of tremendous breath, that
required my stopping every few pages -- sometimes to catch my breath,
sometimes to think of the implications raised, and often just to turn to
the references at the back of the book.  I was continually asking myself,
"Where in the world did this guy find all these wonderful, remarkably
relevant quotations?"


"...........................................  Too often the story is
distorted to meet the preconceived story line of the writer, with precision
of fact being given secondary priority. Too rarely these days are
references even cited.  And, when there are references, it sometimes
becomes painfully obvious that the writer may not have carefully read the
source cited.


"Not so in Darwin Among the Machines. Dyson appears to have gotten it
exactly right, certainly for all the matters that I know about first hand.
Dyson clearly has read the references in detail. And, he fully understands
what he has read.  He quotes by page number from many works written over
the  centuries -- in many cases from original sources by page number -- not
just recent reprints in anthologies.


"Reading about Dyson's background, it is clear that he is not a scholar of
the usual school -- in which our colleges train people to be proficient,
but only in a single field or two.  Rather, here is a masterpiece written
by a truly self-educated man, from a remarkable family, and one who
possesses an omnivorous intellectual appetite, encompassing field after
field to provide a perspective not nearly as visible from the vantage point
of any single specialty.


"First rate show! Well done.  It is a book that I will be recommending to my
friends."


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