Fast-paced story without a plot

The historiography of the history of computing is in a curious state. Breathless tales of rags-to-riches transitions from Californian garage to multinational no longer satisfy the need to frame the late 20th-century prominence of computers in the perceptual and economic landscape. The fixation on hardware and the technological determinism this implies has also had its day. The annals of individual pioneers that dominated the canon for decades also fail to exhaust a phenomenon that continues to defy packaging into any recognisable movement. The problem is that the events are too recent to afford the perspective of distance and historians have been groping for some way forward.

Less than a decade ago, Paul Ceruzzi, a curator at the National Air and Space Museum in Washington, abandoned the attempt to write a history of computing beyond the second world war as there was no theoretical framework to underpin a meaningful treatment. Instead, he and his co-editor, Bill Aspray, published a volume called Computers before Computers, consisting of a series of episodic essays treating the prehistory of computing up to and including the earliest vacuum tube computers developed in response to wartime needs of ballistic calculations and code-breaking. A History of Modern Computing is Ceruzzi's sequel that takes up the story from 1945 onwards.

Ceruzzi decries as impoverished histories that table machines in date order and the introduction takes a brief canter through interpretive genres in the history of technology - social constructionism and Thomas Hughes's classic work on technological systems, for example. This creates an expectation that at last there is a defensible position to take and with it the promise of a modern canon. But the essay into historiography is a nod in the direction of an intractable complexity that Ceruzzi fails to resolve and the book reveals the underlying internalism of chronological succession and iconic milestones.

Once relieved of the impossible burden of theoretical expectation the book excels as an informed account of the emergence of the electronic computer from the exotica of the engineer's laboratory into a fully fledged commercial product.

The chapter on the early history of software provides a welcome balance to the general obsession with hardware and the tale follows the progression from mainframe to minicomputer in the 1960s, IBM's System 360, the impact of the microchip and the personal computer phenomenon of the early 1970s. The final chapter looks at the UNIX operating system and the internet.

The book deals almost exclusively with the United States arena, which reflects the dominance of the US in the postwar electronic era. The British technological lead in the immediate post-war years, which was not capitalised into market share, is no more than mentioned. Winner takes all.

The account is rich in technical detail. In style the wish to please and simplify is sometimes unequal to the complexity of the content. Ceruzzi is at his best when he engages fully with the material and relaxes the need to smile all the time.

As a volume A History of Modern Computing is among the first to provide a historically respectable account of the modern history of computing by a professional historian. But until the pace of change slows, or we have some distance from the decades of relentless innovation, the history of computing remains a story without a plot.

Doron Swade is assistant director and head of collections, Science Museum, London.