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Milestone · 1949

Giant Brains, or Machines That Think

The first book to explain computing machines to a general reader, and it called them brains in the title.

Why it matters

A public vocabulary for machine intelligence formed before the field itself did, and it came with the brain metaphor attached.

Berkeley surveyed the machines at MIT, Harvard, the Moore School and Bell Labs, technically but accessibly. The title fixed the brain comparison in popular usage for decades; Berkeley himself later wrote extensively on the responsibility of computing professionals.

Event record

Event date
1949
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Sources gathered automatically · September 22, 2026
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evt-0067

Year of the book.

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