The authors have put up a website at veniac.com that promises educator guides and a Veniac simulator. These will doubtless serve as excellent companions to the book itself, but even without them, this is an incredible accomplishment.
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If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/11/05/xor-xand-xnor-nand-nor/#brawniac
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"Science Comics" is a long-running series from First Second, the imprint that also published my middle-grades comic *In Real Life* and my picture book *Poesy the Monster-Slayer* (they are also publishing my forthcoming middle-grades graphic novel *Unauthorized Bread* and adult graphic novel *Enshittification*).
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But long before I was a First Second author, I was a giant First Second *fan*, totally captivated by their string of brilliant original comics and English translations of beloved comics from France, Spain and elsewhere. The "Science Comics" series really embodies everything I love about the imprint: the combination of whimsy, gorgeous art, and a respectful attitude towards young readers that meets them at their level without ever talking down to them:
https://us.macmillan.com/series/sciencecomics
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But as great as the whole "Science Comics" series is, *How Digital Hardware Works* is *even better*. Our guide to the most profound principles in computer science is a T Rex named Professor Isabella Brunel, who dresses in steampunk finery that matches the Victorian, dinosaur-filled milieu in which she operates.
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Brunel begins by introducing us to "Veniac," a computer consisting of a specially designed room in which a *person* performs all the steps involved in the operations of a computer. This person - a celebrated mathematician (she has a Fields Medal) velociraptor named Edna - moves slips of paper in and out of drawers, looks up their meaning in a decoder book, tacks them up on a corkboard register, painstakingly completing the operations that comprise the foundations of computing.
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Here the authors are showing the reader that *computing* can be abstracted from *computing*. The foundation of computing isn't electrical engineering, microlithography, or programming: it's *logic*.
When I was six or seven, my father brought home a computer science teaching tool from Bell Labs called "CARDiac," the "CARDboard Illustrative Aid to Computation."
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