TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 627 used even by fairly mediocre designers. A narrow set-theoretical structure forces Mitchell into such formulations as “good design is a subset of feasible design, which in turn is a subset of consistent design.” What about visionary designs that are not feasible? What about works that seek contradiction? Architecture is seriously impov erished by this approach. Sergio L. Sanabria Dr. Sanabria teaches in the Department of Architecture at Miami University. The Age of Information: The Past Development and Future Significance of Computing and Communications. By Stephen Saxby. New York: New York University Press, 1990. Pp. x + 322; notes, bibliography, in dex. $40.00. By now, we all know that we live in the information age. Explaining both the origins and the significance of that information age and the technologies supporting it is a worthy but ambitious goal. Thus, The Age of Information's failure to deliver on the promise of its subtitle is not surprising. While Stephen Saxby, a British specialist in computer and telecommunications law, provides a great deal of information in a single, relatively short volume, his history and his prognostications are marred by naïveté and selectiveness. The book’s opening chapter provides a broad but brieflook at some of the philosophical, mathematical, economic, and legal issues raised by information and its use, then attempts to set communication and information in a historical, cultural, and scientific context. The next two chapters provide more historical perspective. The first of these traces previous revolutions in information technology, focusing on books as the principal past development in recording and communi cating information and on the postal system, telegraph, telephone, and radio as principal developments in personal and business com munications. The subsequent historical chapter considers the prehis tory and history of the computer itself, beginning with the mathemat ics of Newton and Leibniz and ending with microcomputers and D-RAM memory chips. In between, it considers early pioneers such as Charles Babbage and Herman Hollerith; the early big computers, including ENIAC, UNIVAC, and early IBM mainframes; and the development of several generations of programming languages. The final three chapters consider the recent history of computer hard ware, computer software, and telecommunications. Although Saxby deserves some credit for providing historical perspective in an area that so often focuses solely on the future, he has little to offer historians interested in technology. He draws on an odd and often outdated assortment of sources (e.g., a 1960 history of technology, BBC television programs) while ignoring some major 628 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE secondary works (e.g., Michael R. Williams’s A History of Computing Technology and Shoshana Zuboff’s In the Age ofthe Smart Machine). The events or technologies he emphasizes sometimes seem randomly chosen. More troubling, however, is his naive, deterministic, and optimistic understanding of relationships between technology and its political, economic, and cultural setting. For example, he attributes the information revolution “to a single cause: the spectacular techno logical advances produced following the post-war development of the computer” (p. 34) and states that “ever since the discovery by Samuel Morse that the alphabet could be represented by a series of dots and dashes, digital transmission was destined to culminate in an integrated digital network—the ISDN” (p. 293). Near the end of the book he provides an uncritical paean to technology: “Traditional human skills of communication and craftsmanship have always benefitted from the technological advances achieved throughout history” (p. 299). Those interested in understanding recent developments in com puters and telecommunications may find the book somewhat more useful than historians will. Occasionally, Saxby provides interesting insights into legal issues and standards battles. Moreover, on some topics he provides much information about the contemporary British markets (though his shifts of focus between British and world markets often seem random). But readers should beware of taking his accounts even of contemporary events uncritically. For example, the book gives the impression that the original IBM personal computer did not have much effect on the market. It also ignores the recent polarization of the personal computer market between IBM (and compatibles) with DOS and Apple’s Macintosh with its graphical interface. Finally, the book’s abysmal...