Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe

In March 1953 the entire planet held about 53 kilobytes of high-speed memory, and Dyson knows whose hands were on it: von Neumann's circle at the Institute for Advanced Study, where the first H-bomb feasibility calculation ran nonstop for 60 days on the same machine that hosted Nils Barricelli's self-replicating numerical organisms, digital life running years before anyone fully understood DNA. One reader says Barricelli "could justifiably be called the founder of computational biology". The standard story (Turing, Enigma, postwar boom) gets replaced by the crowded real one, engineer Julian Bigelow and the women who did the early machine coding restored to it, "bringing characters to life as complete and complex people". Another reader's advice: "Do not aim to finish the book, or a chapter, just become part of it."

The title sells a Turing book. What arrives is a von Neumann and Institute for Advanced Study book, Turing confined to one real chapter behind a hundred pages of Princeton's founding and faculty politics. Worse, the engineers among the reviewers say the technical passages are wrong: Dyson comes across "terminally confused by the technology he was attempting to describe", a "blind man explaining the concept of colour", garbling the architecture named for his own subject. The chapters run "not chronological, but conceptual", so you lose track of when anything happened, no timeline provided, while hiring dates and salary detail for minor staff swell it a hundred pages past its natural length. Then the ending drifts into wondering whether the internet is alive, "not so much historical as it was prophetic".