MixedThe Wall Street JournalIn The Cryotron Files, Iain Dey and Douglas Buck tell the story of a little-known invention called the cryotron—a liquid-helium-cooled superconducting competitor to the transistor that was, for a time, the front-running technology in the quest to build the fastest, smallest computers. Their interesting book weaves together the biography of the cryotron’s inventor, Dudley Buck of MIT (the father of one of the book’s authors), with a history of key aspects of Cold War defense programs ... The book is marred by the authors’ tendency toward breathless overstatement in their effort to give Dudley Buck what they think is his rightful place in history. And at times they dramatize their work by pushing the reader to view events as connected that could just as easily be coincidences. Despite such matters, however, The Cryotron Files sheds warmth on an unappreciated bit of low-temperature Cold War technological history.
