Hi Dennis, Thomas, Peter, and the SIGCIS list, Wow, thank you all for the helpful corrections and avenues to pursue! Thomas, I'll definitely read your "Actually" article and the books you recommend. Dennis, I'll check out the telegraph and signalling for sure. Peter, thanks for the information about the Eckert-Mauchly company. A little background about my project. From 2009 or so onward, I reported in person from multiple federal sentencing hearings pertaining to the hacktivism/transparency movement. For example, I reported for different venues from the sentencings of Jeremy Hammond, the PayPal 14, and most recently whistleblower Reality Winner [1]. I was also a talking head expert regarding the Stratfor emails in the documentary _The Hacker Wars_; some of my work in that regard was discussed here [2]. Over the years, people have suggested many times that I write a book based on those days, but of course it became apparent to me that audiences are too often far more interested in the personalities of sexy hacker heroes (Rolling Stone articles, for instance) than they are in challenging or philosophical topics that have greater impact on our world. Audiences might eat up heart-throb hackers but don't understand what computer software even is. I'm also interested in this global data commons project [3], but would like to understand it better in terms of computer science history. For those reasons, I've decided to learn more about computers _per se_, aiming to eventually create a book that does include the "hacker heroes" but also the historical and philosophical material required to understand our knowledge economy world better. (For what it's worth, I grew up on BBSes as a little kid in the late '80s and early '90s.) It was the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy that suggested to me _Computable Numbers_ as a starting place, and I'd taken some philosophy of mind courses in college, so I read Andrew Hodges' _Alan Turing: The Enigma_. I'm now reading Martin Davis' _The Universal Computer: The Road from Leibniz to Turing_ and trying to get a handle on the math/logic. I don't have any more definite plans as I'm mostly in the early stage of researching, and I tend to be a generalist autodidact who disregards commercial imperatives, pursues my curiosity, and takes a zillion years to finish anything. Thanks again for all the suggestions. I'm currently in an intensive CELTA certification course for teaching ESL, so I might not reply promptly to further messages, apologies. Doug Links: ------ [1] http://www.dailypublic.com/articles/08242018/reality-winner-sentenced-63-mon... [2] http://whowhatwhy.org/2013/12/04/whowhatwhys-douglas-lucas-on-leaked-private... [3] https://www.getgee.xyz/