From Capone to Cray: Where Computers Really Came From
Where did modern computing really come from?
Not from garages in California, but from bootleggers, codebreakers, and Cold War air‑defense engineers.
This book reveals a lineage that almost no computing history traces:
Prohibition‑era encrypted radio → Elizebeth & William Friedman → OP‑20‑G → MIT Whirlwind → SAGE → Engineering Research Associates → Control Data → Seymour Cray.
From Capone’s smugglers to Cray’s supercomputers, the story of U.S. large‑scale computing is a straight line, just one that has been forgotten.
Combining deep historical research with firsthand experience from the CRAY‑1 era, this book shows how cryptology, radar, and national‑security urgency created the machines that defined modern computing.
If you think you know the origins of the computer revolution, this book will change your mind.
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About the Book
I discovered the birth of modern computing has a surprising origin: radio. That is not well known because facts remained classified for a long time. Modern computing systems emerged from interconnected problems of crime, law enforcement, intelligence, and national defense during the twentieth century.
Beginning with Prohibition‑era smuggling and early cryptanalysis, we follow institutional and technical developments through World War II, Cold War air defense, and the rise of large‑scale commercial computing. This narrative is grounded in documented events, organizations, and machines, with occasional personal recollection used for historical context.
The book is written as retrospective nonfiction and can be read as a series of connected historical episodes rather than as a technical or instructional work.
Author
About the Author
Edward W. Barnard brings unique implementation expertise from programming Cray supercomputers at the hardware level, debugging systems at classified facilities, and solving critical Y2K infrastructure problems. His 20+ years at Cray Research included hands-on work with assembly language, operating systems, and I/O subsystems. He has published over 100 technical articles, helping developers implement solutions to complex problems. His cross-domain experience, from NSA troubleshooting to Saudi Aramco installations, provides practical insights into applying advanced problem-solving techniques across diverse technical environments.
Edward has transferred his skill of bare-metal programming the Cray I/O Subsystem (with only 131,072 bytes of local memory) to novel ways of managing Large Language Model token context windows, unlocking capabilities not yet taught in AI literature. When a skill dormant for 35 years becomes suddenly relevant again, he calls this The Time Travel Pattern.
Episode 317
An Interview with Edward W. Barnard
Contents
Table of Contents
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