In lively, mordantly witty prose, Negroponte decodes the mysteries--and debunks the hype--surrounding bandwidth, multimedia, virtual reality, and the Internet, and explains why such touted innovations as the fax and the CD-ROM are likely to go the way of the BetaMax. "Succinct and readable. . . . If you suffer from digital anxiety . . . here is a book that lays it all out for you".--Newsday.

In this revealing account of how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II, George Dyson illuminates the nature of digital computers, the lives of those who brought them into existence, and how code took over the world. In the 1940s and '50s, a small group of men and women - led by John von Neumann - gathered in Princeton, New Jersey, to begin building one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing's vision of a Universal Machine. The codes unleashed within the embryonic, 5-kilobyte universe - less memory than is allocated to displaying a single icon on a computer screen today - broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, and our universe would never be the same. Turing's Cathedral is the story of how the most constructive and most destructive of twentieth-century inventions - the digital computer and the hydrogen bomb - emerged at the same time.