The idea that ‘inventions’ are actually more matters of system engineering than of eureka breakthroughs and of slow adoption rather than sudden ubiquitousness has been a central contention of this book; but, at first sight, it seems singularly inappropriate to the history of the most radical, the most revolutionary of all the technologies here considered—the computer. How can the pattern of available technology, delay and constraint established above, be meshed with the sudden arrival of computing in every corner of our lives? The answer is that the misperception which saw television as an explosive newcomer in the 1950s has been at work again with the computer. The received history of the computer selectively downplays the lateness of its development and the comparative slowness of its diffusion.
As is now realised, we had the technical capability to build relay, electromechanical, and even electronic calculating devices long before they came into being. I think one can conjecture when looking through Babbage’s papers, or even at the Jacquard loom, that we had the technical ability to do calculations with some motive power like steam. The realisation of this capability was not dependent on technology as much as it was on the existing pressures (or lack of them), and an environment in which these needs could be sympathetically brought to some level of realisation.
Thus Henry Tropp, the Smithsonian’s historian of the computer pioneers, seeks what in this book is termed a supervening necessity. Moreover, the conformity of the computer’s beginnings to the model are repeated in the pattern of its diffusion. The ‘law’ of the suppression of radical potential operated to delay various stages of