Publisher's Synopsis
Our journey takes us from the days of early hand making through to the modern day IS machine, a journey that takes us from the late 17th century through to the early 21st century. There are throughout this discourse many developments that failed to come into fruition, these are explored so that the reader can see the differences in approach that people made to the development of the machines. From such diversity there will be machines that have been missed, some of these machines will be local and confined to a single company, or, due to the sparseness of recorded history they will be the ones that may never be discovered.
