COMPUTERS AT WAR (19391945): THE COMPUTING CHRONICLES Book Three of Ten

Two machines. Two continents. Two teams that never knew the other existed. Both concluded, independently, that the future ran on vacuum tubes.Computers at War follows the six years that compressed decades of ordinary technological progress into a single, brutal necessity. At Bletchley Park, a young mathematician named Alan Turing steps out of pure theory and into a hands-on engineering role, helping build machines that crack German ciphers and quietly shorten the Battle of the Atlantic. In Philadelphia, John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert bet that eighteen thousand vacuum tubes could actually work-against the confident judgment of nearly every electrical engineer in America. And six women, recruited from a wartime calculating pool and handed a machine with no manual and no precedent, invent computer programming from scratch, then watch their names get left off the press release.Book Three of The Computing Chronicles, a ten-volume history of computers from antiquity to artificial intelligence, Computers at War is the story of how a global catastrophe forced three separate wartime crises-codebreaking, ballistics, and the atomic bomb-into the same room, producing the architecture that still runs every computer built today. Some of what happened here stayed classified for thirty years. Some of the people who made it happen never lived to be thanked.