Bit By Bit (Book)
Year First Appeared
1984
Creator
Stan Augarten
Bit by Bit is a 1984 illustrated history of computing by Stan Augarten, published by Ticknor & Fields. The book traces the development of computing machinery from the abacus and Babbage's Analytical Engine through mainframes, minicomputers, and the early personal computer revolution, ending in the early 1980s. Augarten organizes the story around the people who built the machines — Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Herman Hollerith, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Grace Hopper, Steve Wozniak — and pairs the prose with hundreds of black-and-white photographs, technical diagrams, and archival images, many published for the first time. The book is roughly 300 pages and was widely praised at the time for being both rigorous and readable for a general audience.
Importance in Internet Culture
Bit by Bit was, for nearly two decades, one of the most accessible and authoritative histories of computing available to a general reader. Published just as personal computers were entering homes and offices, it gave a generation of programmers, founders, and enthusiasts their first coherent narrative of where their machines came from — connecting the punched cards of Hollerith's tabulators to the silicon of the Apple II in a single throughline. The book appeared at a critical inflection point: the IBM PC was three years old, the Mac had just launched, ARPANET was about to be split into MILNET and the civilian network that would become the internet, and the first generation of people who would build the Web were in their twenties reading books like this one. Augarten's work helped establish the popular understanding of computing as a human story — driven by individuals, not corporations — a framing that the early Web's hacker culture would adopt as its own founding mythology.
Interesting Fact
Augarten was 30 years old when Bit by Bit was published, and he had previously written State of the Art: A Photographic History of the Integrated Circuit (1983), one of the first books to treat the microchip as a subject of serious visual and historical attention. Bit by Bit is dedicated, in part, to the staff of the Computer Museum in Boston (the predecessor to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View), and many of the rare photographs in the book came from the museum's collection during a period when computing history was still being actively rescued from dumpsters and storage closets. The book has been out of print for decades and is now itself a collector's item, often cited by historians as a primary reference for the pre-Web era.