Reading George Dyson's Turing's Cathedral. True to form, the book has a picture of Turing as the front cover, and Turing never appears in the text proper (or hasn't yet except in passing, and I'm more than halfway through). I suppose if he had named it Von Neumann's Cathedral people would have been confused and he would get fewer sales, but it would be more accurate: the whole thing is about the development of the MANIAC, which could be considered to be the first solid-state electronic digital stored-program computer. The book is entertaining, though remarkably disorganized (after a chapter on the legal war with the creators of the ENIAC, he skips over to a chapter about the imprisonment of William Penn, only because both things were tangentially related to New Jersey). The technical details of the MANIAC are kind of incredible: this machine from the 1940s had 40-fold parallelism and used cathode ray tubes for RAM, and it was built using wire wrap and had no boards.
