Cyrus C. M. Mody argues, as perhaps no others have, that many of those driving the microelectronics industry in the 1960s and 1970s were ‘square’. This is an odd term, best defined, perhaps, as outstandingly ordinary. The cover of his new book, The Squares, carries a sepia photograph of half a dozen squares of the period, each in anonymous jacket and tie, and all rather more hirsute than they will be now. Your reviewer squirms in recollection of the dundrearies he himself sported in those days. But the cover photo is promoting an IBM 7030 computer and these men, as befits squares, are incidental. This may be the point that Mody is making: the squares are overshadowed by their accomplishments in the development of microelectronics.