During that first year at Harvard, my fathermet a man who, had circumstances been ever-so-slightly different, would have altered the course of his professional life. That someone was an older graduate student named Howard Aiken.

Tall and handsome, with piercing, owl-like eyes, Aiken would become the force behind the world’s first fully operational general purpose computer, the so-called Harvard Mark I, a room-sized, fifty-foot colossus of camshaft and relays built by IBM to Aiken’s specificat...