Forthcoming book
The Family Tree of Tech
From the First Transistor to Artificial Intelligence
About the Book
Every technology has parents.
In December 1947, in a laboratory in New Jersey, a sliver of germanium made a man’s voice louder. Nobody in the room could have imagined what would grow from it: chips, personal computers, operating systems, the web, search engines, the cloud and, today, artificial intelligence.
The Family Tree of Tech tells that story as a family history. The microprocessor needed the integrated circuit, the web needed the internet, and today’s AI needed all of them, plus graphics chips built for video games. When you see the family resemblance, the present makes more sense.
Twenty-nine chapters in seven parts, framed by a Prologue and an Epilogue, illustrated throughout with photographs and diagrams.
The parts and chapters of the book.
- Part One · The Roots
- Prologue: The Voice in the Crystal
- 1. Before the Transistor: The Machines That Could Calculate
- 2. The Transistor Was Born Twice
- 3. The Eight Who Walked Away
- 4. A Computer on a Single Chip
- Part Two · Teaching the Machines to Obey
- 5. The First Programmers
- 6. The Language Closest to the Machine
- 7. The Great Translation: FORTRAN, COBOL and the Compiler
- 8. The Languages That Built the Future, and Those We Forgot
- 9. Unix, C, and the Promise of Portability
- Part Three · The Computer Enters the Home
- 10. The Hobbyists Who Built an Industry
- 11. Gary Kildall and the Operating System Revolution
- 12. The IBM Meeting That Changed Computing
- 13. When Computers Acquired Windows
- 14. The Operating System Wars
- Part Four · Software Without Borders
- 15. The Laboratory That Split
- 16. The Student Who Wrote a Kernel
- 17. The Birth of the World Wide Web
- 18. The Browser Wars and the Commercial Internet
- Part Five · The World Becomes Connected
- 19. The Search for What Matters
- 20. The Computer You Never See
- 21. The Computer in Your Pocket
- Part Six · The Machines Begin to Learn
- 22. Rules and Examples
- 23. The Graphics Card That Changed Everything
- 24. ImageNet, AlexNet, and the Return of Neural Networks
- 25. When a Machine Made an Unexpected Move
- 26. The Architecture That Changed Language
- Part Seven · The Machines Begin to Act
- 27. The New Artificial Intelligence Race
- 28. From Answers to Actions
- 29. The Physical Limits of Artificial Intelligence
- Epilogue: The Next Chapter Has Not Been Written
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The ebook has not been published yet.
Ebook coming soon