So why you should read this book? Because it gives you a much deeper understanding and appreciation of our field. After all, it takes about 2/3s of the book to reach the topic of integrated circuits.

This, of course, requires a lot of topics, starting from the different numeral systems, how you can encode characters (Braille, Morse), how you can build simple relays, adders, and what physical limitations you hit while you try to scale these solutions. That’s why it really goes back to the basics. What gives particular value to this book, it is that it doesn’t just share how certain things evolved and got invented, it really tries to include not-so-techy people, the author tried his best to make everyone understand how the computer works. Code goes beyond just telling our history. It starts laying down the foundations by analyzing the Morse code, the Braille alphabet, the Boolean algebra, the telegraphs. This book doesn’t only go back to the 1930s, but centuries. Whether you ride a TGV, a Shinkansen, or just a simple train it doesn’t change the fact how we invented the steam engine and put it on wheels moving on rails. After all, it is about our history whether you use a few hundred MBs of RAM or 16 GB, it doesn’t change the basic rules of how computer memory was invented and how it evolved.

You might find some parts a bit old but it should not distract you. Recently, I found some references to Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold. A book that is not directly about our history, but touching some parts deeply was Coders At Work, a really long book including 16 interviews with highly appreciated computer scientists and programmers. Like there was the now seemingly (and sadly) inactive (as of July 2020) channel of Byte Sized. There are some interesting sources, books, initiatives. John Kennedy went more broadly when he wrote “without history, we have no future.” But what is our history as developers? What is the history of computer science? Recently I wrote about Sapiens and I quoted Churchill - you know the guy who pretty much led the fight against Nazis - saying that “a nation that forgets its history has no future”. If you have been reading my book reviews, you know that I like history.

Code the hidden language of computer