Every great age in history has had its legends and storytellers and the deeds and battles of the heroes of the relatively young tech empire are celebrated in Forbes Greatest Technology Stories.
Jeffrey Young begins his saga with the tale of John Atanasoff whose concept of the first digital electronic calculator led to the first computers.
Just as in a Hollywood movie script, his obsession to invent a better calculator led him to drive through the farmland of Iowa one night and stop for a drink in some roadside cafe where he had his brainstorm . . . and the rest is history.
A different military project resulted in the ENIAC - Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer - which in 1945 could perform about 5,000 calculations per second, more than 10,000 times slower than the average personal computer today.
Young emphasises that the development of computers in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was part of the US military's drive to stay ahead of the Soviet Union in the race for technological mastery during the Cold War. Defence contractor, Lockheed, was the biggest employer in the Santa Clara Valley in California in the years before it became better known as Silicon Valley.
This is where Steve Jobs grew up and it was the dream of this generation of visionaries to bring computers into the home to be used as an everyday appliance by Joe Public rather than taking up a special area in the office. By 1981 Jobs and his Macintosh team would be as concerned with how their machine looked as with anything else.
The IBM PC was accepted by the business community as a valuable tool and IBM's longstanding reputation for reliability helped sell the product.
Young tells his stories well and manages to translate the intricacies of circuits and chips into plain English. Like any good storyteller he enjoys humorous asides - the untidy young Bill Gates did not look like a competitive tycoon, "dandruff followed him everywhere".
The genesis of the corporations that dominate today's digital age is covered in detail here as is the sometimes painful development of the technology itself. Within 50 years a revelation in the Iowa prairie had become the future of business in the developed world.
So if you are stuck for a stocking filler for the geek in your life this Christmas, Forbes Greatest Technology Stories may be just the thing. There is no mention of a CD-Rom or online edition.
