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A fascinating book about the various way computers and coding have changed the world. Some essays are on the history of coding and others are on famous code hacks. Some essays touch on ethics, social justice, discrimination and cheats that coding has enabled. And, of course, one essay is one that infamous comment found in the Commentary on UNIX: "You are not expected to understand this."

What follows is a summary of each essay in the book.

1. The First Line of Code: a look at what may be the first lines of code written in history to control weaving looms using punch cards.

2. Monte Carlo Algorithms: Random Numbers in Computing from the H-Bomb to Today: on the history of Monte Carlo Algorithms, whose statistics and random numbers are used in many fields to estimate the future behaviours of systems in many fields.

3. Jean Sammet and the Code That Runs the World: on programmer Jean Sammet who (with Grace Hopper), pulled together early attempts at programming languages to come up with COBOL.

4. Spacewar: Collaborative Coding and the Rise of Gaming Culture: on the history of Spacewar, the first graphical computer game, and the culture (and joy) of hacking computers that came up around it.

5. BASIC and the Illusion of Coding Empowerment: on how BASIC enabled interactive programming for students on time-shared systems. But early on, this was only for entitled students, mainly the better-off white males in the US.

6. The First Email: The Code That Connected Us Online: the ability to send messages from one user to another on the same computer system was so in demand that the need to be able to send messages from one system to another was developed and became the email that we know today.

7. The Police Beat Algorithm: The Code That Launched Computational Policing and Modern Racial Profiling: the search for a technological solution to policing at a time when racial riots were rife would lead to the surveillance systems in use today.

8. "Apollo 11, Do Bailout": on the capabilities of the computer on the Apollo Lunar Lander that enabled the moon landing.

9. The Most Famous Comment in Unix History: "You Are Not Expected to Understand This": this comment, and others in source code, show the personalities and abilities of the people who wrote the code, and left such comments in the code as guidelines (or for fun) for future programmers.

10. The Accidental Felon: on the history of the Morris worm, the self-replicating code that bought down many systems in the early days of the Internet.

11. Internet Relay Chat: From Fish-Slap to LOL: on the propagation of the culture of leaving 'actions' as words on the early internet relay chat into today's social media, leading to postings of LOLs and other kinds of interactive reactions, as well as emojis.

12. Hyperlink: The Idea That Led to Another, and Another, and Another: the history of hyperlinks, which lead people from one document to another, ad infinitum.

13. JPEG: The Unsung Hero in the Digital Revolution: how JPEG works to compress digital images and how this would lead to the fingerprinting of images to individual digital cameras.

14. The Viral Internet Image You've Never Seen: refers to the notorious single pixel image file that appears (hidden) on webpages and emails to track who is fetching the information.

15. The Pop-Up Ad: The Code That Made the Internet Worse: written by the person who wrote the first pop-up ad, it talks about taking responsiblity for what you do with technology.

16. Wear This Code, Go to Jail: starting with the Perl code for the RSA algorithm printed on a shirt, it goes on to shows the problems with trying to do export controls or to restrict software.

17. Needles in the World's Biggest Haystack: The Algorithm That Ranked the Internet: on the ranking algorithm that lauched Google.

18. A Failure to Interoperate: The Lost Mars Climate Orbiter: the Mars probe was lost due to conversion bug between metric and imperial measurements. But the article points to the bigger problem of the decline in interoperability of current day software and applications due to business decisions (to restrict competition).

19. The Code That Launched a Million Cat Videos: viral videos of cats reacting to the iRobot Roomba vacuum cleaner helped to make it popular. But the software for the Roomba at the time, that controlled its somewhat random behaviour, also helped to make it beloved for the idiosyncratic way of cleaning a room.

20. Nakamoto's Prophecy: Bitcoin and the Revolution in Trust: on the development of bitcoin and the blockchain behind it that may yet revolutionize the way people trust one another and do business without a central authority.

21. The Curse of the Awesome Button: the development of Facebook's 'Like' button started off as a way to provide feedback on the social network. But it then became a way to track users as they moved from site to site.

22. The Bug No One Was Responsible For-Until Everyone Was: Heartbleed (a buffer overflow error in OpenSSH) was a programming error, but it showed the effects of using a popular piece of code but not providing proper support to the developers of the code.

23. The Volkswagen Emissions Scandal: How Digital Systems Can Be Used to Cheat: how software became a way to cheat and get around regulations.

24. The Code That Brought a Language Online: the development of software to allow users to enter text in Bangla after a terror attack in Bangladesh would have repercussions for blogging and freedom of expression in the country afterwards.

25. Telegram: The Platform That Became "the Internet" in Iran: Telegram enabled users in Iran to communicate and to broadcast messages in channels until it became Iranian's view of the Internet, for a while.

26. Encoding Gender: the issues around storing information on gender, when most databases are set up to only accept two binary gender values.

A good collection of stories about the Second Age of Middle-Earth, told in chronological order. The stories are from the writings by J.R.R Tolkien, as collected and edited in various books by Christopher Tolkien. Many of the stories concerns Númenor, from its rise as an island haven for Men in the west after the fall of Melkor (Morgoth), to its downfall (and the end of the Second Age) after being corrupted by Sauron.

The book starts with a look at the geography and ecology of Númenor, followed by what makes Númenoreans different from other men in Middle-Earth. The chronological story of the Second Age is then told, showing the rise of Númenor, first as teachers of the men of Middle-Earth, then becoming arrogant and turning into conquerors. The parallel story of Sauron, who deceives some of the Elves into crafting Rings of Power, only to craft the One Ring to rule them all, is also told, setting up the conflict between Númenor and Sauron.

It is one that Númenor apparently wins at first, but Sauron is cunning and corrupts most of the Númenoreans from the inside, eventually leading to its downfall. Back in Middle-Earth, the kingdoms of the faithful Númenoreans in exile and Elves form the Last Alliance to fight Sauron and succeed in defeating him. But the One Ring is lost, not destroyed: the story of its discovery and destruction would be told in other books.

An interesting graphical novel based on the usual 'chosen one' who has to save the world. But this one has a rather big twist towards the end, and you may start to wonder whether she has been chosen to really save the world or to destroy it.

In the story, the world as we know it ended in the year 2000, when electricity failed and magic began to work. Trouble is, nobody knew how to control magic at the time, leading to catastrophic spells being cast. Now, many years later, stable magical regions of the world exist, but a dark magic is creeping out, slowly devouring the regions.

Into this steps one special girl who has been trained by his grandfather (now a powerful wizard) to be the Chosen One to gather magical items for him so he can cast a spell to save the world. But clues left throughout the story hint that something is not quite right with her journey: as if she is being led to a foregone conclusion. It is only resolved with a massive twist at the end and now, it is truly up to her (and her friends) to come together and really try to save the world.

A fascinating book looking at the history of the Chinese Computer, or attempts to enable the input and display of Chinese characters in the early days of computers. Now known as IMEs (input method editors), it was not a given that the most popular method now used for Chinese, Hanyu Pinyin, would be the dominant one, nor that it is now so efficient that is can rival, or even exceed, the speed of entering words using Latin alphabets. Early IMEs used numeric coding, codes based on the structure of Chinese characters, and other methods which might have become dominant. But Hanyu Pinyin would win in the end due to politics and an advantage, compared to other methods, at entering multiple characters.

What follows is a chapter by chapter summary of the book.

"1: When IMEs Were Women: IBM, Lois Lew, and the Dawn of Electronic Chinese" looks at the history of one of the first Chinese entry systems used. It uses four-digit codes to represent the most popular Chinese characters and the ability of a typist to memorize the codes and enter them to generate the words. This was based on the telegraph system which also uses four-digit codes for Chinese characters, so it was possible for a typist to memorize most of them. And a Chinese woman, Lois Lew, would become the main person to demonstrate this ability in demonstrations by the inventor of the input method.

"2: Breaking the Spell: Sinotype and the Invention of Autocompletion" covers entry system based on the characteristics of Chinese characters. These break down Chinese characters into subcharacters and strokes and assigned to certain keys. These keys were then entered in combination to reproduce the Chinese character. Efficiency in entering characters was by arranging for the most often used strokes to be most easily accessible. More efficiency by achieve by allowing Chinese characters to be selected based on a minimum set of key entries that uniquely identify it. This was, essentially, a form of word prediction and autocorrecting. A display would show the selected character to the typist for confirmation before it was finally entered.

"3: Farewell, QWERTY: The Quest for a Chinese Keyboard" covers the period when non-Qwerty keyboards were used to input Chinese characters. At this time, many keyboards were proposed, all with hundreds of keys, with different ways of mapping a combination of keys to each Chinese character.

"4: The Input Wars: Zhi Bingyi and the Return of Hypography" covers the rise of minicomputers and microcomputers used in China, usually ones imported from the West. This gave new impetus to entering Chinese character entry using a Qwerty keyboard. It covers various schemes for generating characters based on various input schemes. Many were proposed during this period, but only a few made it to market, as they needed to work with the manufacturers of the computers to implement them.

"5: The Search for Modding China: Printers, Screens, and the Politics of Peripherals" looks at the microcomputer era with the introduction of Apple II and IBM-PC like computers. These microcomputers came with peripherals, like monitors and printers, pose new challenges to producing Chinese characters. Made for Western alphabets, they lack the resolution or ability to show or print Chinese characters. It was the rise of modders and hackers who worked to modify printer hardware to make them produce Chinese characters. Operating systems also had to be hacked or modified to handle Chinese input systems, and to display and print Chinese characters. These changes propagated back to manufacturers of the operating system, leading to the rise of 'international' operating systems that have the built-in ability to display Chinese characters and other languages.

"6: Connected Thoughts: Chinese in the Age of Predictive Text" covers the rise of Hanyu Pinyin as the most used input system today. Compared to other Chinese input systems at the time, it was less efficient at entering individual Chinese characters. But Hanyu Pinyin overcomes this due to the capabilities of modern computers for predicting input, allowing computers to quickly enter well-known multi character phrases faster than other input methods that were optimized for generating single characters. Multiple domain specific databases of Chinese characters also allowed Hanyu Pinyin to quickly produce output for specific purposes. It also didn't hurt that the Chinese Government encouraged the use of Hanyu Pinyin as an alternative writing method to traditional Chinese characters.

The book ends will a note that even today, people are still inventing input systems for Chinese and other non-alphabetic written languages. Globally, computers with such input systems now outnumber Western style entry systems (one key for each character). Now, with AI chatbots, one-letter-per-key entry systems may even see a decline in the future, as people now use chatbots to enter words on their behalf based on a prompt.

"True Names" is Vernor Vinge's fascinating story that is one of the first to present the concept of a cyberspace and is generally considered one of the first stories in what would become the genre of cyberpunk.

In the story, True Names refer to the actual names of persons who have personas in what Vinge calls the "Other Plane". In the Other Plane, those which hacking skills are the 'Warlocks' and they dominate the Other Plane with what is essentially 'magic' since their hacking skills is akin to casting magical spells on regions in that world (which represents hacking computer systems around the world and in space). Of course, the Warlocks would protect their True Names, as once they are known, they can be forced to do the others bidding so as not suffer a True Death (killed).

The story starts with the True Name of Mr Slippery in the Other Plane being discovered by the government. But the government is more concerned with another person known as the Mailman, who has apparently hacked government and possibly military systems without being detected, and they need his help to discover who is the Mailman.

As the story proceeds, Mr Slippery and another hacker discover that the Mailman might not be another human, and may be about to launch a cyber-driven attack on the world. To stop him, they have to grab control of the resources of the US government systems. But even then, the Mailman is a powerful adversary, and they may not be able to stop him while the Mailman is also trying to stop them by sending them to their True Deaths. Worldwide pandemonium in computer systems ensue. In the end, the real identify of the Mailman is discovered, but the world may never be the same.

The story is fascinating for its portrayal of the Other World, where a virtual world is visualized much like a fantasy land. But the landscape is actually a representation of computer systems from around the world: ponds represent data storage, castles represent defended computer systems, and fantasy creatures are the systems that guard the entries to the system. The warlocks themselves are master hackers, able to break into systems, and the battle with the Mailman is the act of controlling and gathering computer resources to dominate and deny them to your opponent.

The book starts with a series of essays on the influence of the story on various people and computer systems at the time. Some essays examine the issue of computer security and the tension between free speech and privacy, and the US government's desire to gather more information on people. Others look at attempts to produce a cyberworld using networked computer systems. The essays, written in the 1990s, are an interesting look at the time when microcomputers and computer networks are just starting to have an influence on society.