Edmund Berkeley Publishes "Giant Brains," the First Popular Book on Electronic Computers

In 1949 mathematician and actuary Edmund Berkeley issued Giant Brains or Machines that Think, the first popular book on electronic computers, published years before the public heard much about the machines. The work was published by John Wiley & Sons who were enjoying surprising commercial success with Norbert Wiener's much more technical book, Cybernetics.

Berkeley did not devote a lot of his text to the actual issue of whether or not computers actually could "think," though the topic was a kind of buzzword at the time. For discussions of that topic see the theme Computers & the Human Brain.

Among many interesting details, Giant Brains contained a discussion about a machine called Simon, which has been called the first personal computer.