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Introduction

Please change. It's in the very nature of things to change. In a world that seems everywhere connected, change comes even faster.

Have you ever wondered how this connected world of ours first got connected? That very first link? Who first thought to do it and why? Connections that now link over 2 billion of us—that's a quarter of all humanity. Connections over which we send each other some 10 billion gigabytes of information every month. Connections that will quadruple in two years. I was curious about where it all began, so I went hunting for that beginning, and Bright Boys is that story—the making of that very first connection, preceded by the making of the world's first real-time electronic digital computer and the world's first digital network.

And all of it, ushering up from the minds of one small group of people. Their work was quite simply, the beginning that changed everything. Hello and welcome to Bright Boys. My name is Tom Green, writer and producer at brightboys.org. For the past five years, brightboys.org has been chronicling the coming of my book, which is all about the making of information technology from 1938 to 1958. My website adventure has now produced the book that tells that story.

The book recounts the incredible high-stakes journey of a team of cocky yet brilliant young men who began making information technology some ten years before the term information technology was even coined. Everything has a beginning. None was more profound and quite unexpected than information technology. Here, for the first time, is the untold story of how our new age came to be, and the Bright Boys who made it happen.

It all began to come together here in 1948, 211 Massachusetts Avenue, an old run-down former laundry building a stone's throw from the front door of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Bright Boys is the story of a band of brothers on the digital frontier. The rise of the first digital young 20 who first began connecting our world. Brash upstarts who went from being outcasts to heroes. Strangers in a strange land who spoke a new and different language, who built strange otherworldly looking machines and who pioneered levels of complexity totally alien to others around them.

Their technology would stretch from real-time computing all the way to the shores of the internet. This guy, Tom Corbett, space cadet, who as he put it was from the world beyond tomorrow, was the sci-fi idol of the times and probably the only one who could truly understand and appreciate what the Bright Boys were doing.

The Bright Boys were young, brilliant, confident, and cocky, and thought they could do anything they put their hands to. And usually did. Which for many hovering nearby, waiting impatiently for them to go bust, was grandly irksome. There were remarks that the Bright Boys were arrogantly high hat and snobbish, that they were unrealistic about what they were doing, and that they were young and immature. As things turned out, and rather quickly at that, they proved themselves eminently capable.

By 1950, these bright boys had built the world's first real-time electronic digital computer. Three years later, they one-upped themselves when they switched on the world's first digital network. In 1953, their work was met with incredulity and completely overlooked. By 1968, their work was gospel. Today, it's the way of the world—information technology.

At the request of the U.S. government, they were asked to use their computer technology to create a system for the air defense of North America, which they did. What began on the bare floor of the old laundry building eventually grew to rival in size the Manhattan Project. They built the first electronic air operations center, which was copied by every modern military force worldwide, and in the process created the first electronic air traffic control center which a half-century later is an international standard for all commercial aircraft. Best of all, they saved the rest of us from the clacking, din, and drudgery of geared information machines.

Mechanical typewriters, adding machines, calculators, comptometers, printing presses, and all their geared kind. The Bright Boys' labor-saving invention began a liberation process for all of us. The Bright Boys were inventive in all that they touched. They originated modular construction of computers. They invented the modem and taught AT&T how to use it. They conceived of IBM's first computer assembly line. They originated computer memory that became the industry standard until the 1970s. They introduced the first graphical interface, the first computer keyboard, and the first light gun, an early form of the modern computer mouse.

Via hundreds of innovations, they became legends in the industry. The Bright Boys' story is history, yet it is also timeless. It is a familiar journey that repeats itself over and over again, whenever someone, somewhere, turns a dream into a reality. I dedicated the book to all those Bright Boys, past, present, and future, who did a dream to take a chance, to explore and thereby to discover. As James Byron Conn put it, Behold the turtle. He makes progress only when he sticks his neck out.

Bright Boys is the story of technology when technology was young, 1938 to 1958. Two decades that ushered in the new world of electronics. A remarkable 20 years when computers were giants, their makers young and unknown, and when there was less than a megabyte of random access memory on the entire planet. Microprocessors were science fiction, transistors were handmade and mistrusted, and banks of hot glowing electron tubes ruled the land. Networks were meant only for telephones and electric power grids, and the word digital was new on the air.

As Victor Hugo wrote over a hundred years ago, an invasion of armies can be resisted, but not an idea whose time has come. Information technology was an idea whose time had come and the Bright Boys made it so. They pushed their technology onto the world's stage, a stage unprepared for its arrival, an analog world that had grown content, complacent, and dependent on analog and electromechanical calculating machines.

"We had the engineer's dream," recalled one of the Bright Boys decades later, "a nationally important problem that was interesting and difficult but not impossible to solve. We were in a day-to-day contest with mother nature. The odds were bad, but we always had a chance to win, and we won all the battles. We also won the cause for digital computing. If there's anyone who thinks we didn't win, just go to Radio Shack and try to buy an analog computer."

From the bare floor of that vacant factory, Bright Boys launched the country on one of the greatest and most successful projects in the history of American engineering. No similar enterprise had ever, or has since, sprung from such humble surroundings.

If you happen to find yourself one day on the sidewalk and passing your local bookstore, or online at your favorite bookseller's website, cast a glance at a book cover that looks like us with the title of Bright Boys. It's a wonderful story for readers to linger over and enjoy and to savor. Bright Boys is an inspirational story with real people as real heroes of courage, of bucking the odds, of light doing, integrity, and faith in the future. For readers looking for real people struggling to do all the things right against all odds and succeed, Bright Boys will be a journey of delight. Scholarly research that reads like a novel, course companion, bedside pal, already referenced to the history of information technology. Bright Boys, the beginning that changed everything.