I think the challenge to reading Gleick's book is in the way he talks about people. He'll introduce one at the beginning of his chapter, give a whole background to the character and then start to introduce new people without any definitive story about them. Although there doesn't need to be a background story for each new person he introduces, that would be ludicrous, what I just wanted was some cushion to make the person stand out and not just his/her ideas.
But I don't think that Gleick is in any way a terrible writer by any means. In fact I think the way he writes about people, theories, technology, and events is intentional when going with the book's title. It forms into a flood of information and makes the subjects hard to focus on after a long period of time. Or when the ideas shift without any sort of pause it becomes hard to figure out where one idea began and another ended.
I think the point is that not any one person knows where to start thinking about the history of computing and present day technology. It is all a jumble piece of information and what is really the beginning of this technological jump that we've reached in present day. Nor should we know ever single detail off the top of our heads. We should be able to understand that 1) the steps it took from the beginning to now are vastly important, and 2) there is so much to know about technology in general that no one person should know it all. Even Gleick doesn't know it all and doesn't expect us to know it all, which is why he writes it the way he does.
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