How we got here:  A slightly irreverent history of technology & markets

Posted by Rezwan on Jan 23, 2010 at 10:02 AM
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How we got here:  A slightly irreverent history of technology & markets

by Andy Kessler •

Per Amazon:

Expanding on themes first raised in his tour de force, Running Money, Andy Kessler unpacks the entire history of Silicon Valley and Wall Street, from the Industrial Revolution to computers, communications, money, gold and stock markets. These stories cut (by an unscrupulous editor) from the original manuscript were intended as a primer on the ways in which new technologies develop from unprofitable curiosities to essential investments. Indeed, How We Got Here is the book Kessler wishes someone had handed him on his first day as a freshman engineering student at Cornell or on the day he started on Wall Street. This book connects the dots through history to how we got to where we are today.

The book has some great stream of consciousness on electricity and power generation.  It weaves the story of the evolution of computers through the absurd needs of human beings, putting motivations into a new light.  In the chapter on “Ballistics, Codes and Bombs” it says:

It is Hiroshima and Nagasaki that are remembered.  But that failed night raid over Yawata [Location of Japanese coke and iron works] 14 months before marked the beginning of the end of the Industrial Age [segue to Information Age].  Had the Allies possessed precision guidance systems it is quite possible that Hiroshima would never have happened.  But lacking the ability to target ordnance with any precision, the only available solution was to make the bombs bigger and bigger until they became so destructive they were effectively impossible to use.  But it soon became clear that atomic and nuclear weapons in themselves would produce only stalemate; real wars would continue to be fought by other means.

The search for precision guidance systems and cracking enemy codes boosted computer evolution.  The search for bigger bombs fueled nuclear research.  Such ignoble beginnings.