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THE science of computing touches every aspect of our lives, but how many of us really know how it works 鈥� or how we got to where we are today?

It鈥檚 quite a story. In Digitized, computer scientist Peter J. Bentley has to zip through decades to cram it all into just 240 pages. He looks at the way computing has grown from its early theoretical basis in mathematics to now encompass many things we take for granted, covering the giant vacuum-tube machines of the 1950s, the birth of the internet and beyond along the way.

But Digitized is as much about the people behind the breakthroughs 鈥� the bright, inquisitive minds who saw something that their peers did not and used the tools of their era to push forward human understanding. Alan Turing, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon and Douglas Engelbart flit in and out of the narrative as we learn about the birth of rudimentary coding and transistors. While Bentley delivers the technical detail in an easy-to-understand manner, it is the tales of these pioneers which give the book its heart and colour.

The first part of Digitized shows innovators struggling to shine a light on the future, but it is when that future begins to reveal itself that we see the scope of what they set in motion. Stock market monitoring, biologically inspired software 鈥渁gents鈥� and multicore processors seem to come from a different planet to the one inhabited by those early computer scientists.

Even so, attempts to build a synthetic brain and the many false dawns of artificial intelligence show how today鈥檚 computer scientists wrestle with the same question their predecessors did: what does computing teach us about what it means to be human?