PREFACE<br > This book is only nominally about computers. In an impor-<br >tant sense， the computer is used here merely as a vehicle for m~)ving<br >certain ideas that are much more important than computers. The<br >reader who looks at a few of this book s pages and turns away in<br >fright because he spots an equation or a bit of computer jargon here<br >and there should reconsider. He may think that he does not know<br >anything about computers， indeed， that computers are too compli-<br >cated for ordinary people to understand. But a major point of this<br >book is precisely that we， all of us， have made the world too much<br >into a computer， and that this remaking of the world in the image of<br >the computer started long before there were any electronic comput-<br >ers. Now that we have computers， it becomes somewhat easier to see<br >this imaginative transformation we have worked on the world. Now<br >we can use the computer itself--that is the idea of the computer--as<br >a metaphor to help us understand what we have done and are doing.<br > We are all used to hearing that the computer is a powerful<br >new instrument. But few people have any idea where the power of a<br >computer comes from. Chapters I to III are devoted to explaining just<br >QQ<br ><br >