Bright Boys:1938-1958

BOSTON: Chapter 6 of "Bright Boys" has been online since late in 2006 and has enjoyed over 20,000 downloads. It's companion podcast, "From Outcasts to Heros", has been streamed by Technology for Everyone thousands of listeners for nearly as long.

I'm on to something very special with this book. It strikes a chord with both general and specialist readers who appreciate science and technology presented as mainstream history. Readers feel the same way reading Chapter 6 as I did while writing it: we're each on a voyage of discovery witnessing first hand how our global information society first wiggled its way into existence. It's a compelling tale, fascinating and thought provoking from sixty years back. It's a window into how the future came to be.

Scholarly research that reads like a novel.

History of technology buffs, like good detectives, love the hunt and "Bright Boys" has plenty afoot for everyone. And what better story to unravel than the genesis, the how and why behind our our digital age and how, incredibly, it came to be. No one had ever written it down before. "Bright Boys" is a first. Readers quickly recognized that fact and revelled in discovering a gem of a website. The site has since picked up in popularity as word spread.

Of my online readers, and astonishingly so to me, those from China outnumber everyone else. In China, readers find American technical ingenuity great stuff; they can't seem to get enough of it. They read and listen and then pass it along to friends and colleagues. They ponder the scientific techniques at play in the book; they dream about the act of discovery, and about pulling off something ingenious themselves. The Chinese are a wonderfully appreciative audience truly dedicated to the website. It shows me that "Bright Boys" displays a distinct knack for percolating a bit of wonderment through readers' imaginations around the world. For this writer, that's rich appreciation and applause for five years of hard work bringing the story to life. Amazingly, only online could such an audience have been reached half a world away. And for that superb gift, I have the original bright boys to thank.

As Howard Reingold wrote in "Tools for Thought": "You can't tell where mind-amplfying technology is going until you know where it came from...and why." "Bright Boys" is the where and why of IT.

Growing my audience for "Bright Boys".

"Bright Boys" was completed as of November 2008; nine chapters and 115,000 words, extensive chapter notes and a full bibliography.

Publishers interested in reading the manuscript can first request a look-see at the "Bright Boys" book proposal and in-depth marketing study. Click here for Contact page.

The first high-tech
wise guys.

By 1950 they'd built the world's first real-time computer. Three years later they one-upped themselves when they switched on the world's first digital network.

In 1953 their work was met with incredulity and completely overlooked. By 1968 their work was gospel. Today, it's the way of the world: Information Technology.

All from a bunch of cocky 'digerati' who felt they could do anything they set their hands to, and usually did.

CAMBRIDGE, MA: In 1946 they should have had better sense than to risk what was left of their youth and careers on what everyone sniggered about as a fool's quest. Wasn't being dragged mercilessly through the Great Depression and then Information Technology:1950-2010

forced to endure the daily terror of World War II enough for one lifetime? Couldn't they just agree with Harry Truman's slogan that "We've never had it so good."and enjoy the "so good"?

The bright boys couldn't bring themseleves to do any of the normal things again; there was still something yet to do: the challenge of a lifetime. They were intent upon building a machine the likes of which had been deemed impossible to build, what historians now concede as the most complex machine that had ever been built by humans. Decades later, one of the bright boys in old age would recall those halcyon days, saying that "try as he may thereafter, he never ever again found its equal for intellectual exhileration and shear derring-do."

What began on the The Barta Building, 211 Mass. Ave., Cambridge, MA

bare floor of an old laundry building eventually grew to rival in size the Manhattan Project. The unexpected consequence of that journey was huge: Information Technology. And even more unexpected: trying to convince someone, anyone, that information was the key to most everything else.

For sixty years the bright boys have been totally anonymous while their achievements have become a way of life for all of us."Bright Boys" brings them home.