Customer Reviews
Good, but slightly sketchy at times - By: Dannydorko, 27 Aug 2007 
The first two thirds of this book is well worth reading, & overall, I agree with the above reviews. The story of Jacquard (or as much of it as is known), & his momentous invention is a very important & overlooked one.
Much of the later sections of the book, however, will be old ground to anyone who's reasonably familiar with the history of information technology. And I found the last chapter - a meandering riff on the future of computing & the fact that, ooh!, we just can't predict it - to be a complete waste of time. It reads very much like something writtenin a state of 'Oh My God I need 15 more pages before my deadline tomorrow' panic.
The biographical sections of the book (most of it, to be fair), are extremely well done, employing a well-tuned balance of historical context & personal detail. I was disappointed, though, by the passages that attempt to convey exactly how each new device or discovery described actually works. Rather than a step-by-step breakdown, accompanied by a useful diagram or two, there was usually a few sentences referring vaguely to principles or processes which it is assumed the reader must be familiar with.
Overall though, that's a quibble, & Jacquard's Web is an extremely absorbing tale.
Just skirt delicately around the last chapter & head straight to the appendices...
Computers in Victorian times...... - By: Heli, 26 May 2007 
No one could read the first chapter of this book & not finish it. In fact, I've just spent the past two days devouring it from start to finish. It's an entertaining fact-filled romp through the entire history of something that dominates our lives, & that we always think of as entirely modern... & yet the history this book traces goes back nearly 5,000 years.
What I liked best about it was the teasingly thought-provoking idea the author raises: that our computer age could have started over 150 years agoin Victorian England...
According to Jacquard's Web, the Victorian scientist Charles Babbage spent a lifetime building & refining metal calculating cogwheel machines or 'engines' as Babbage called them. The working portions of the Engines he built worked perfectly. As Babbage's friend & colleague Ada Lovelace once said, it was the first timein history that 'wheelwork' had been taught 'to think'. But funding ran out & Babbage died never seeing his calculating engines come to fruition.
What I found so incredibly thought-provokingin this book was thatin Londonin 1991 a perfectly working Difference Engine was built from Charles Babbage's plans & drawings. I have seen the Difference Enginein action myself (as the white-gloved engineer cranks the handle, the stacked columns of cogwheels spiral & coalesce beautifully as they perform their mathematical calculations) but I hadn't realised the significance at the time.
According to the author, James Essinger, if Babbage had found the funding to complete his Engines, computers could have come into widespread usein the nineteenth century. Now if that isn't a thought-provoking idea I don't know what is!
Fascinating and Fun - By: Romaine Billows, 28 Nov 2006 As a fan of science & technology literature accessible to the layman I found this book absolutely superb. Entertainingly written from the opening paragraph, Mr Essinger traces the fascinating roots of our modern computer cutlture from their surprising origins. Of the best books of its type I have read.
computing made fascinating - By: Heli, 30 Nov 2004 As the least technologically-minded person I know I bought this book because I wanted to find out what computers really are & how they've come to dominate our lives today. The book didn't disappoint. It performs the unlikely paradox of making computing interesting - fascinatingin fact.
This is because Jacquard's Web is such a human story. The author breathes life into some incredibly interesting characters - an ancient Chinese princess, two cheeky monks from Constantinople who perform the first recorded instance of industrial espionage when they sneak silk-worm eggs out of ancient Chinain their walking sticks, the greedy kings & queens of Europe & their unquenchable desire for luxurious fabrics, Napoleon, the fascinatingly eccentric Victorian computer pioneer Charles Babbage & his friend Ada Lovelace - daughter of the notoriously sexually rapacious poet Lord Byron, & of course dedicated, ingenious Jacquard himself.
I was surprisingly fascinated by the more modern portion of the story: Essinger's account of the trials & tribulations of Herman Hollerith & 1890 US Census when the US government struggled to find new technology to cope with the unprecedented mass of data that was pouring in. (Jacquard's punched card technology did the trick) & the account of the dawn of IBM.
This is a friendly, frequently very funny tale, & - for me - an enjoyable & truly memorable initiation into our high tech world of IT & the computer. I thoroughly recommend it.
a Victorian computer revolution..... - By: Heli, 30 Nov 2004 No one could read the first chapter of this book & not finish it. In fact, I've just spent the past two days devouring it from start to finish. It's an entertaining fact-filled romp through the entire history of something that dominates our lives, & that we always think of as entirely modern... & yet the history this book traces goes back nearly 5,000 years.
What I liked best about it was the teasingly thought-provoking idea the author raises: that our computer age could have started over 150 years agoin Victorian England...
According to Jacquard's Web, the Victorian scientist Charles Babbage spent a lifetime building & refining metal calculating cogwheel machines or 'engines' as Babbage called them. The working portions of the Engines he built worked perfectly. As Babbage's friend & colleague Ada Lovelace once said, it was the first timein history that 'wheelwork' had been taught 'to think'. But funding ran out & Babbage died never seeing his calculating engines come to fruition.
What I found so incredibly thought-provokingin this book was thatin Londonin 1991 a perfectly working Difference Engine was built from Charles Babbage's plans & drawings. I have seen the Difference Enginein action myself (as the white-gloved engineer cranks the handle, the stacked columns of cogwheels spiral & coalesce beautifully as they perform their mathematical calculations) but I hadn't realised the significance at the time.
According to the author, James Essinger, if Babbage had found the funding to complete his Engines, computers could have come into widespread usein the nineteenth century. Now if that isn't a thought-provoking idea I don't know what is!
