Bright Boys opens wide a door onto one of the great but little known tales behind the rise of modern technology. "To know how things first began and why is to gain insight into how they work and why they are important."
Well known and revered among their colleagues and within the narrow confines of peer-reviewed professional journals, military papers, and government publications, the bright boys and their deeds, like so many others like them, have sadly avoided popular recognition for nearly a half century. |
Bright Boys is the story of how the pursuit of the air defense of North America in the 1950s brought forth real-time command and control, which, in turn, would become the undisputed lion in all of military affairs and permeate every facet of modern Information Technology. Bright Boys is the story of how it all came about, the people who pulled
it off, and why it’s so important. Bright Boys chronicles a saga of connections and crosscurrents, people and events crisscrossing through recent history. Playing out roles are air battles from the Spanish Civil War, Jimmy Doolittle returning the Mighty Eighth in 1946, brilliant but obscure engineers in research labs, radar and radios, digital computing, Information Theory, and a fate-filled meeting in 1949 at a Pentagon taxi stand. Through grit, hard work, a little derring-do, pure genius, and out-and-out good luck, the bright boys forged an elusive idea into a technological marvel.
|
|
|
