
Step by step, you discover Morse code (discarding several options prior to reaching this stage). You need to use technology which is freely available and will not wake up your parents. Of course, you don't have a phone or anything like that. Petzold challenges the reader right at the start - assume you're 10 years old and in your home, trying to talk to your friend on the other side of the street. It's a story of how our modern world came to be. It's not a description of who did what, or how a particular piece of technology works. But this one went to the top of my list very quickly, perhaps just barely 20 pages in. It was marked as a best seller, but that doesn't mean much, especially when computer science is concerned. I ordered it together with The Annotated Turing, again by Petzold.

To be honest, I did not expect much of this book. To learn more about how and for what purposes Amazon uses personal information (such as Amazon Store order history), please visit our Privacy Notice. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie Preferences, as described in the Cookie Notice.

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