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From the Publisher
It is a fascinating and easy read, and the photographs on the dust cover and throughout the book are used with excellent effect and add to the reader’s feel for the time and place. … the book goes well beyond describing the Whirlwind creators. … I recommend Bright Boys to anyone who wants to begin to understand where some of modern computing came from before the Internet era. I also recommend taking a look at the book’s website before or while reading the book. Perhaps as it did with me, the book will leave you wanting to know more.—IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2011
A+: This is how a computer history book should be written. It’s an amazing history of MIT in the 1940s and 1950s around the invention of the computer. Some other places place an ancillary role (like the Moore School at U Penn and Harvard), but MIT and Cambridge are front and center.
—Technology Review, May 2010
Bright Boys cuts right to the heart of how complex technologic systems are conceived, incubated, and grown across generations. Tom's clever writing style draws a reader into the story and the remarkable depth and breadth of his research holds the reader firm, often enthralled, throughout. This is a remarkable case study of the birth and development of a technological system that indispensably beats as the heart of the economy, communications, transportation, and culture- circulating life's blood of information around the globe in the blink of an eye.
—Dik Daso, Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum
A fascinating story of how it felt to be present at the creation of the Information Age, at a time when, as the author says, there was less than a megabyte of computer memory on the whole planet.
—Paul E. Ceruzzi Smithsonian Institution, National Air and Space Museum
The research conducted by writer, producer, and playwright Green is impressive ... Recommended.
—CHOICE, November 2010, Vol. 48, No. 03
Astonishingly rich and broad recapturing of the subject period. Marvelous and exciting writing!
—Wes Clark, designer of the TX-0 and TX-2 computers
Every time you book an airline ticket, retrieve cash from an ATM machine or even thaw a steak in a microwave oven, you owe a debt to two young men who in the summer of 1946 conceived the first real-time digital computer in a rundown former laundry building near the Charles River in Cambridge, Mass. ... Robert Everett and Jay Forrester were the leaders in the design of that first digital computer, which they called Whirlwind, a behemoth that filled an entire floor of the vacant factory. They are the foremost “bright boys” of the title. With the creation of the Whirlwind leviathan, the bright boys launched the country on one of the greatest and most successful projects in the history of American engineering.
—Tom Mackin, New Jersey Star-Ledger, May 2010
The twentieth century had untold growth and advancement in technology. Bright Boys tells the story of one group of individuals who were driven to push these ideas further and spurred the technological development of the nation following World War II. Working with next to nothing in Cambridge, Massachusetts, these college students brought forth the beginning of many of today's technical ideas. Bright Boys is a riveting read of technological history, highly recommended.
—Midwest Book Review, July 2010
The story that unravels between the front and back covers provides a well-written, well-researched discussion of the intricate configuration of circumstances and individuals that conspired in two major firsts: (1) Whirlwind, a first-of-its-kind digital computer capable of processing and delivering information in real time and (2) digital networks capable of transporting information. In the book, Green takes special care to make the reader aware of the social and scientific contexts in which the 'bright boys' worked and flourished; the result is a highly enjoyable history lesson with a true feel for the human aspect of many of the key players.
—Cyntrica Eaton, AAAS Science Books & Films, August 2010
Overview
Everything has a beginning. None was more profound—and quite as unexpected—than Information Technology. Here for the first time is the untold story of how our new age came to be and the bright boys who made it happen. What began on the bare floor of an old laundry building eventually grew to rival in size the Manhattan Project. The unexpected consequence of that journey was huge—-what we now know as Information Technology.
For sixty years the bright boys have been totally ...