Thinking through machines predates the machines themselves. The existence of calculus proves that some problems may be tractable before it is possible to solve them practically. History, viewed as such a problem, might thus be transformed into a mathematical equation that, when solved, would produce the future. This was the belief of the early computational thinkers of the twentieth century, and its persistence, largely unquestioned and even unconscious, into our own time is the subject of this book. Personified today as a digital cloud, the story of computational thinking begins with the
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