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In Turing鈥檚 Cathedral: the origins of the digital universe, science historian George Dyson exposes a little known precursor to your PC

SECRECY and computers have always been intertwined. Developed during the fraught years of the second world war, details of the efforts to build Colossus, the British machine that helped decrypt Nazi messages, were kept close to the chests of the Allies.

In Turing鈥檚 Cathedral, science historian George Dyson shines light on the critical period when computers came into being. He begins with British mathematician Alan Turing鈥檚 famous 1936 description of a machine designed to resolve a problem in mathematical logic.

While impractical and not intended for construction, the theory behind the Universal Turing Machine, as it is now called, laid the foundations for computer science. But it was not until the 1940s that anyone set out to build the first practical computer.

Dyson focuses on US efforts, when at the close of the war a group of engineers, scientists and mathematicians, gathered together by Hungarian-American polymath John von Neumann (pictured) at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey, bent their minds to the making of the IAS machine.

Providing a riveting account of the people behind the IAS machine, Dyson also conveys the electrifying sense of possibility that the first computers unleashed. With the machine half-built, early programmers began to write software to simulate hydrogen bomb explosions, follow genetic mutations, predict the weather and examine the life cycle of stars.

But in claiming that the IAS machine begat all others, Dyson downplays the influence of UK-based work on computers at that time. The IAS machine was important because it was copied and reported on around the world. Von Neumann鈥檚 team was able to publicise it freely, whereas wartime secrecy prevented Turing from discussing the earlier Colossus. And the IAS machine did not stand alone: it relied on 鈥淲illiams tube鈥� memory 鈥� developed using the UK鈥檚 Manchester Baby computer, which had become operational three years earlier 鈥� because there was no alternative in the US.

Nevertheless, Dyson鈥檚 book is a page-turner for anyone fascinated by the beginnings of the computer age and an important text covering a little-known computer that had a big influence.