Customer Reviews

Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology

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Unwittingly maybe, Rheingold provides a really good account and even reference of the history of computing. He writes well and unlike some CS writers marries his subject with the real world. If you are studying the history of computing I really recommend this over Ceruzzi's book.

Entering the 21st century it's still amazing to find that so many of the pioneers of computing are still alive. Rheingold has interviewed many of them over the years and this book is an interesting and valuble contribution to the genre.

The novel feature of the book is the way in which past interviews are brought up to date and the interviewees give their opinions on the differences between what they predicted and what happened.

The writing is excellent and very accessible. The interviewees come across as very normal people (which indeed they are) but it is very easy to forget they were still amongst the movers and shakers of computing in the late 20th century.

I think this book is a valuble work for those who see technology are more than just a vehicle for making money.

The Afterword alone is worth the price of the book. Rarely does a thinker with the acumen of Rheingold also exhibit a willingness to re-examine, refine, and, on occasion, reverse positions taken a decade or more ago. Rheingold does in a way that is informative and mind-opening. Aside from the mound of solid information and provocative observations about the Internet in human life, Rheingold's prose is as comfortable and welcoming as those toes tucked into the grass as he composes on his laptop. A must read.

This is a must read for anyone who wants to understand computing all the way from the bare metal to the near-future. It ranks with Fred Brooks' "The Mythical Man Month." If you don't know this stuff, you don't really know what's inside the box, and how it got there.

It's also a pretty entertaining read, though I think the author gives a bit too much credit to von Neuman.

Howard Rheingold, former Editor of the Whole Earth Review and one of the pure-gold original thinkers in the Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly circle, lays down a serious challange to both decisionmakers and software producers that has yet to be fully understood. Originally published in 1985, this book was a "must read" at the highest levels of advanced information processing circles then, but sadly its brilliant and coherent message has yet to take hold--largely because bureaucratic budgets and office politics are major obstacles to implementing new models where the focus is on empowering the employee rather than crunching financial numbers.

This book is a foundation reading for understanding why the software Bill Gates produces (and the Application Program Interfaces he persists in concealing) will never achieve the objectives that Howard and others believe are within our grasp--a desktop toolkit that not only produces multi-media documents without crashing ten times a day, but one that includes modeling & simulation, structured argument analysis, interactive search and retrieval of the deep web as well as commercial online systems, and geospatially-based heterogeneous data set visualization--and more--the desktop toolkit that emerges logically from Howard's vision must include easy clustering and linking of related data across sets, statistical analysis to reveal anomalies and identify trends in data across time, space, and topic, and a range of data conversion, machine language translation, analog video management, and automated data extraction from text and images. How hard can this be? VERY HARD. Why? Because no one is willing to create a railway guage standard in cyberspace that legally mandates the transparency and stability of Application Program Interfaces (API). Rheingold gets it, Gates does not. What a waste!

This book (first published in 1985 with an afterward by Rheingold written for the 2000 MIT Press edition) is not about the history or development of computers or the history of electronics concurrent with the history of computers. It is not about computer design, computer hardware, computer architecture, computer programming, or computer software. It is about a selected few people in the history of computers and how amazing Rheingold thinks they and their ideas were. Only incidentally, and rarely, do we learn anything about what computers were like during the period these people were active or influential. This is a book written by a cheerleader. Rheingold is more interested in waving his pom-poms than allowing us to see the background details for what all his cheering is about.

His divides his team into three groups and lists them in chapter one:

Patriarchs - Charles Babbage, George Boole, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon.

Pioneers - J. C. R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Taylor, Alan Kay.

Infonauts - Avron Barr, Brenda Laurel, Ted Nelson.

From Babbage to Shannon the book kept my interest. But in later chapters its lack of detail and incessant cheerleading diminishes the value of the book. Overall the book is superficial. It came out at the mid-point of the 1980s, when the computer was on everyone's mind with the advent of the IBM PC (1981) and the Apple Macintosh (1984). The interest was in this new age of "mind tools" and how science-fictiony and cool the future was going to be, and how the computer was going to "augment" our mind and make us all really, really smart and efficient. Rheingold seems to see the computer as becoming the technological analogue of the 1960s counterculture's "mind expanding drug" without the bad trips of the chemical originals.

Rheingold says in his 2000 Preface that the book was written in 1983, although he squeezed in a couple sentences mentioning the Macintosh: on page 207 in reference to the PARC Alto, and on page 229 in reference to the earlier PARC inspired Apple Lisa.

Curiously, in a book with the subtitle of "The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology", Rheingold never discusses the actual applications of this new technology and how indeed the computer has made an extraordinary difference. He is silent on this even in the 2000 Afterward, where he could have discussed the advances made since the initial publication of the book and could have imagined future "mind-expanding" applications. He refers to the Internet, but of course by 2000 that was the Really Big Deal in the use of computers. But even there he has nothing of interest to say.

Computing as mind-expanding technology. Such a beautiful perspective is shown throughout this book where some of the greats minds can be found. It will give you an insight and novel views you never thought they could ever exist. It will change your way subtly but deeply.

This book gives a very good early history of the development of computers and includes some interesting pictures related to this. I think the book bogged down a bit in the latter part but it is worth it for the early history.

Tools for Thought dives into the history of computing and specifically the history of technology that augments human thinking from the perspective of a few influential people. The book is ordered chronologically starting with Babbage and Boole and ending with people the author guessed would become very influential like Ted Nelson and Avron Barr. Each chapter covers one person and their contribution to the history of computing.

The book consists of "three generations". The first generation are the people influential and building the first computers. This starts with Charles Babbage who build the analytical engine--the first computer (though he never got it working). George Bool who's boolean algebra and Alan Turing who's mathematics formed the basis of the first digital computers. John von Neumann then actually build the first digital computer. Then Norbert Wiener who invented cybernetics and Claude Shannon who created the information.

The second generation are the people who were influential to creating the ARPANet and the first personal computer. Starting with Licklider who was the first ARPA director and funded many of the important projects that lead to technological breakthroughs. He was later followed up by Bob Taylor who lead the development of ARPANet. The first hosts were at MIT were the MIT hackers were creating timesharing machines (strongly influenced by McCarthy who invented AI and list), Another host was Dough Engelbert's lab at Stanford where he research augmentation and developed the mouse. Another host was University of Utah where most of the important research related to computer graphics was happening. Bob Taylor later left to lead the Xerox PARC lab where he collected the smartest people at that time who there created inventions such as the personal computer, the laser printer, and ethernet. Alan Kay was working also in PARC Lab and worked on the Alto and created the Smalltalk programming language.

The third generation were people who the author thought would become influential. At this moment, their influence has not been as strong as the first or second generation, but who knows. The three people he mentions are Brenda Laurel who was leading a research group at Atari related to human computer interfaces, Avlon Barr who was developing expert systems and Ted Nelson who was developing Xanadu which was some kind of a hypertext, versioned document management system. The book ends with an afterword in which the author reflects on the last three people after 20 years and explains where they ended up.

Tools for Thought is well written, engaging and fun to read. Looking at the history of "mind-expanding technology" from the different individuals perspective gives and interesting view on history and also makes quite clear how all people were related and how they build on each others work. Definitively recommended reading for anyone who is interested in computer history especially when you are looking for something that is easy to read.