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Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics. By David A. Mindell. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002. xvi, 439 pp. $46.00, ISBN 0-8018-6895-5.)
Historians in all specialties know of the dangers of ordering the events of the past into a progression that seems to lead, inevitably and logically, to the world of the present. Historians of technology have a difficult job in not doing that. Museums and popular accounts speak of milestones of technological advances, as if the road from the Stone Age to the Information Age is already there. When studying the history of the electronic digital computer, it is not easy to resist a narrative that emphasizes only those events on the road to the modern, digitally networked planet, a job made especially difficult by the degree to which academic scholars have embraced digital computing.
David A. Mindell, a professor in the program in...