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From the Abacus to the Algorithm

This series of books was originally intended to be a single massive volume, but when the first chapter became worthy of a book in its own right, that plan changed. The series is intended to be a comprehensive multi-volume exploration of the inventions, the machines, the people, the minds and the many milestones that codified the modern world. What began as a singular history evolved into a comprehensive library of the digital age, with each volume dedicated to a pivotal era or innovation that shifted the trajectory of human progress.

The series traverses the full arc of computational history: from the mechanical elegance of early difference engines to the high-stakes "clones wars" that broke the IBM monopoly, and from the quiet emergence of hacker culture at MIT to the world-altering rise of Artificial Intelligence.

Rather than a dense technical manual, each book in the series functions as a narrative deep-dive. It combines historical context with the human stories of heroes like Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Thomas Watson, Seymour Cray, Charles Simonyi, Linus Torvalds and many others. Together, they form an essential roadmap of how we built a world on silicon and offer a provocative look at what happens as we reach the sands of its limits.

A Spark of Logic: From Counting Beads to Vacuum Tube Computing

by Brian Alan Bakker

This book was published in early March 2026 on Amazon. It's available on Amazon.com, on Amazon.co.uk and on various other Amazon sites but, sadly, not in the author's home country. That's because Amazon doesn't have print-on-demand arrangements in South Africa and it means that we have to make separate arrangements for that. The process is under way.  

In the Works

• Foundations of an industry — The IBM System/360

• The mainframe is dead; long live the mainframe — IBM and the BUNCH: A titan and its five challengers

• From machine code to software industry — Moving from binary and assembly into the third generation of programming

• Broadening the base — How the mini computer revolution improved business accessibility

• The curse of the monitor — The inevitability of software bloat: Complexity always increases over time

• The super man — The story of Seymour Cray and super computers

• Out of ARM’s way — The surprising story of Acorn Computers

• Food on the table: The rise of business software — From programmable functionailty to packaged software

• Amateur hour: The original personal computers — How hobbyists presaged the PC era and probably inspired it

• A PC on every desk and in every home — The IBM PC: the first mass-produced personal computer for business and home

• A monster on every desktop — The Unix workstation: a personal super computer

• Attack of the clones — How IBM lost control of its own invention: the PC

• Right place, right time: the Microsoft story — How Bill gates and Microsoft stole IBM's lunch

• The arbiters of antitrust — Government gives and government taketh away: Breaking up the IBM monopoly

• Jobs Inc. — The surprising story of Apple Computer

• Big little wars — The computer game revolution

• Connecting the dots — The arrival of peer-to-peer networking

• Wiring the world — When the world is your network: The dawn of the internet

• Hypertext hype — The story of the World Wide Web

• The importance of PARC — One of a very few critical centres of innovation

• The genius of Unix — Portability and machine independence was the dream

• The curse of Unix — But the reality was closed open systems

• World domination in your spare time — Linus Torvalds and the invention of Linux

• Undeniably historic — Open source: The idea that made Linux possible

• Organising the data — Edgar Codd: the invention of SQL and the arrival of RDMS. Also dBase, Oracle and Access 

• Printing the data — From band printers to drum printers to dot matrix, inkjet and lasers (Incl John Warnock & PostScript)

• Hacking the future — Black hat; White hat. The emergence of Hacker culture at MIT's Model Railroad Society

• Selling computers to everyone Developing the channel: Why IBM needed one, and why Dell bypassed it

• Keeping bits and bytes — The evolution ot storage: From magnetic tape to fixed disks, optical storage and solid state devices

• Codifying the world — A programming evolution from Cobol & Fortran to Ada & SmallTalk; C to Java; Basic to C#; Coding to no-code

• Securing data — From enigma to PPK encryption. The evolution of data protection

• Malware and other threats — The anatomy of computer viruses: Where did they come from? Why? And what does the future hold

• The Orient Express — From Hitachi mainframes to low-cost compoent manufacturing to controlling mass-market hardware

• Unsung heroes: Charles Simonyi — From Xerox Parc to Microsoft and the template for managing the industry

• The thinking machine — Artificial Intelligence: How it emerged, where it is and where it may be going

• The sands of time — The computer industry was built on silicon but we're fast reaching its limits. What's next?