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The Digital Flood: The Diffusion of Information Technology across the U.S., Europe, and Asia. By JamesW. Cortada. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Pp. xx+789. $99.
Over the past decade, historian and business consultant James Cortada has produced an impressive body of work that addresses the history of computing and information technologies in the United States. His most recent book, The Digital Flood, dramatically expands the focus to include not just the American story but also western and eastern Europe as well as Asian countries like India, Japan, and China. This ambitious task is driven by a basic question:What was it about information technologies "that caused so many managers and public officials to embrace it?" (p. ix). The result is a detailed global history of computing, in turns both multinational as well as transnational.
Cortada focuses largely on a half-century that began roughly in the mid-1940s. This, he explains, is where one finds the origins of "Wave One" of information technologies (IT). This era, as he defines it, was marked by features such as the development of computers, extensive government investment in IT, and widespread consumer use of devices like personal computers and video games. His narrative-readable yet lengthy and occasionally repetitive-takes one through several different industrial eras as the "electronic data processing" of the...