This volume is a concise but comprehensive survey of a topic that is familiar to business historians, namely, the rise of the commercial computer industry as it evolved from military projects conceived during World War II. One can easily find books about the history of computing technology, about the role of key companies in that history, about key inventors, entrepreneurs, and scientists who brought this world into being. But Martin Campbell-Kelly and Daniel Garcia-Swartz argue that business and economic histories of computing are far less common, and a short but comprehensive overview rarer still. The reader may at first be puzzled by this claim—after all, there is no shortage of books written about the history of the IBM Corporation and about Microsoft, two of the companies that dominated computing for decades. And indeed, this volume devotes a lot of attention to those two companies, especially the former. But those corporate histories, like similar histories of Google, Sun, Digital Equipment Corporation, and so on, fail to provide context, as this volume does.

Rather than focusing on the rise and fall of specific players in the industry, the authors structure their narrative around several basic themes that give meaning to this tangled and complex story. Chief among those themes is the establishment of standards: for the structuring and processing of data, the execution of software, and later on the standard operating systems for personal computer and portable devices. Computer firms strive to establish standards that their competitors have to follow, as IBM did with its System/360 mainframe architecture and Microsoft did with its MS-DOS and Windows operating systems. Competitors could opt out of the standard, but that was usually a poor business decision. The emergence of “open source” software, based around the Linux operating system, threw this model into disarray, but that only further validates the authors' emphasis on the significance of standards as a central theme during all phases of this history.

A second major theme is the placement of the industry, dominated by American firms, in an international context. I know of no other volume, large or small, that provides as much of a survey of European and Japanese responses to IBM's mainframe business in the early era, and to Asia's rise as a supplier of components and subsequent systems during the later PC era. The chart on page 189, showing the rise of China as a dominant supplier of computer hardware from 1985 to 2007, is almost shocking in its portrayal of an industry in flux. I do have a minor quibble: In their discussion of the response by Japanese firms to IBM's dominance of mainframe standards, the authors do not mention the claims by IBM that Fujitsu, Hitachi, and Toshiba gained a foothold in the market by pirating IBM software and, in at least one case, stealing critical IBM documents from a Tokyo hotel safe. The charges are described in chapter 1 of Charles H. Ferguson and Charles R. Morris, Computer Wars: The Fall of IBM and the Future of Global Technology (1993), another chapter which is cited in the book under review. The authors do chronicle how much time, effort, and money IBM spent defending itself from various lawsuits, which affected its ability to innovate as the technology advanced. Microsoft suffered the same fate, and now it is Google's and Apple's turn.

The computer industry is stamped by a pace of technological innovation that no other modern industry approaches. Readers whose desk drawers are filled with discarded two-year-old obsolete cell phones while they drive perfectly serviceable ten-year-old automobiles, or fly on twenty-year-old commercial jet aircraft, understand that. Yet early standards, practices, and firms have persisted over the past six decades. The authors describe this as a paradox, but their focus on standards shows that maintaining what is sometimes described pejoratively as “legacy systems” actually makes a lot of business sense. The effort that goes into developing complex software has lasting value, and it is well worth retaining an otherwise-obsolete standard to extract that value for as long as is practicable. Human beings are an adaptable species, but there is a limit to how much change we can accommodate. The computer companies had to adapt to changing technology, and even reinvent themselves as technologies they had helped create caused disruption. Not all of them were successful, as the fate of the Digital Equipment Corporation demonstrated. At some point you decide to move to a new standard, but when? The authors tell the unfortunate story of Lotus Development Corporation, which failed to quickly adapt its best-selling spreadsheet, Lotus 1-2-3, to the Microsoft Windows standard, thus ceding its spreadsheet's dominance to Microsoft Excel. Microsoft in turn has had to reinvent itself in the face of mobile computing, whose operating system standards are being set by Apple and Google. IBM survived by reinventing itself as a services company, although it still manufactures high-end mainframes. Still, its future as a significant player in the industry is far from certain.

Although most readers of this journal own or have read the various business histories mentioned above, those histories are no substitute for this volume, both for its comprehensiveness and, especially, for its placement of the U.S. industry in an international context. I highly recommend it.