Where did modern computing really come from?

Popular histories tell familiar stories: garage inventors, eccentric geniuses, Silicon Valley sparks. But the machines that shaped the 20th century, and the supercomputers that followed, emerged from a completely different world: bootleggers with radios, rum‑runner codes, Prohibition‑era cryptanalysis, Cold War radar networks, and the birth of real‑time digital control.

This book reveals the hidden lineage connecting all of it.

From Capone to Cray uncovers how large‑scale American computing actually developed, tracing an unbroken chain that almost no existing computing history follows coherently:

• Criminal radio traffic and encrypted bootlegger networks forced the U.S. government to create its first modern cryptanalytic organizations.
• Elizebeth and William Friedman turned ad‑hoc codebreaking into a professional science.
• OP‑20‑G, born from these efforts, grew into the institutional engine that later seeded computer architecture, storage theory, and signals intelligence.
• MIT’s Whirlwind and the SAGE air‑defense system pushed digital computing into real‑time performance, mass reliability, and interactive control decades before Silicon Valley existed.
• Engineering Research Associates (ERA) carried wartime cryptologic expertise into the private sector, establishing the template for large‑scale electronic computing.
• Control Data Corporation, founded by ERA veterans, produced the world’s first transistorized large-scale computers.
• And at the end of this lineage stands Seymour Cray, whose machines, including CDC 6600, 7600, and CRAY‑1, embodied everything this hidden history had built toward.

Blending rigorous research with firsthand experience from the CRAY‑1 era, this book shows how American computing grew not from business offices or hobbyist garages, but from smugglers, spies, codebreakers, physicists, radar engineers, and Cold War urgency.

If you want to understand where computers *really* came from, not just the myth, but the machinery, institutions, and people who made it possible, this is the book.