The Machine War

A philosophical history of the computer from Archimedes to today, and an investigation into Urbit's project to reinvent computing from scratch    "This book is areal pleasure and I'm blessed that I can say I'm reading this for work on company time without crossing my fingers."—Marc Hochstein, Coindesk     This story is a strange one. It begins with 33 lines of an invented language—like a Martian’s first attempt at human speech, or a Principia Mathematica written by someone who had never laid eyes on a math textbook—which is so compact it can fit onto a T-shirt. It involves the elevation of conferences on Lambda Calculus and the Haskell programming language—not usually fire starters—into events that became national news. Its first blueprints were drawn up by one of the most eccentric and incendiary American political-philosophical firebrands this side of Tom Paine, and yet it rests on an idea so straightforwardly benign that it has brought a nod of interest and excitement to anyone I’ve