You might think of the portable typewritter as a forerunner of the computer but its actually far closer to writing than word-processing. A line could be drawn; starting more than 2 millenia ago ...

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti: IBM, the CIA, and the Cold War Conspiracy to Shut Down Production of the World’s First Desktop Computer Meryle Secrest. Knopf, $30 (304p) ISBN 978-0-451-49365-1 ...

Biographer Meryle Secrest chases a theory that two key Olivetti computer visonaries' deaths did not happen as officially recorded. While a gripping read at times, there's not a lot of solid ground.