I just finished Walter Isaacson's book, The Innovators. You might remember Mr. Isaacson as the the man Steve Jobs approached and ultimately convinced to write his biography, but he also wrote a couple excellent memoirs about Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein.

The goal of The Innovators is to walk us through the major advances in computer science that brought us to the technology that we enjoy and love today.

In my opinion, the most fascinating part of this evolution begins in the 1840's, when Ada Lovelace essentially mapped out the steps that are used to write a program computer program over 100 years before engineers could actually build a machine capable of running a program.

The book then moves on to discuss vacuum tube computers such as Eniac, the development of the transistor, the development of the microchip, the invention and popularization of the mouse and GUIs, Bill Gate's software commoditizing hardware, and the explosion of the Internet. And, of course, the collaboration of countless innovators that fueled this revolution.

I've read a number of books (Steve Jobs, iWoz, Nerds 2.0.1, Eniac, Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web) that discussed many of these individual topics, but The Innovators is a great summary of the age of computing from it's humble beginnings to the present day.