Bit by Bit

Bit by Bit is about ideas – in particular, the ancient and great idea that intellectual work can be performed by machines. The notion apparently originated with the invention of the abacus in Babylonia about five thousand years ago and evolved, in ever more potent forms, into the slide rule, the mechanical calculator, the punch-card tabulator, the first electronic calculating machines, and finally, in the United States and Great Britain in the late 1940s, the electronic digital computer.