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Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World
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Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World description
Building the pyramids was child's play compared with designing the Internet and other highly complex 20th-century projects. So many individuals and organizations had to come together to successfully build these more recent monumental structures that new ways of managing complex undertakings had to be invented on the spot. Eminent technology historian Thomas P. Hughes explores the development of systems engineering in Rescuing Prometheus, which focuses on four projects that are bewildering in their enormity, yet were completed successfully. The SAGE air-defense project transformed computers from mathematical labor savers into decision-makers by proxy, and spawned the first elements of "postmodern management." Then, the Atlas missile program brought together the disparate elements of the military-industrial-university complex and demanded new, less hierarchical control over individual subprograms. This new way of thinking brought engineers such as Dean Wooldridge and Simon Ramo to prominence. Hughes follows these developments in systems engineering closely as they were applied to ARPANET and Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel Project. Along the way those projects encountered both the simplifying synergy and maddening political slowdowns involved with not just a handful of problems, but entire communities of messy problems. Readers discouraged by seemingly inflexible barriers to solving complex social and technical problems can take heart after reading Rescuing Prometheus. This book shows that while we still can't fix the world, we're building better tools to do so every day. --Rob Lightner |
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Rescuing Prometheus: Four Monumental Projects That Changed the Modern World Customer Reviews
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♥♥♥♥♥ |
Boring telling of an interesting tale
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| Hughes has picked out an interesting subject to write a book about--namely the rise of large scale technological projects in the post WWII world. Unfortuantely, I don't think he's enough of a writer to bring it off. The best popular science/history hybrids bring you a sense of the excitement of the technological advance, a new knowledge of the problems faced and solutions found, and an insight into the characters and personalities behind the science. Hughes doesn't really do any of this. The book is extremely dry and reads like a laundry list of facts rather than a compelling narrative. None of the characters ever come alive. And for the most part, I didn't feel he did a very good job presenting the technological challenges faced. I think he perhaps tried to do too much with the book, telling four stories instead of one or two in the depth required to really draw the reader in. I really wanted to like this book, especially as a former worker in operations research/systems analysis. But unfortunately, Hughes doesn't deliver on the promise that the subject has. |
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