Computers - History

Today's digital culture traces its roots to the 1980s, when the first computer generation came of age. These original techno-kids grew up with home-brew programs, secret computer access codes, and arcades where dedicated video gamers fought to extend their play by earning "extra life."...

When John Mauchly and Presper Eckert developed the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer (ENIAC) at the University of Pennsylvania during World War II, their intention was to aid artillerymen in aiming their guns. Since then, in the past fifty years, ENIAC and its offspring...

The 15 scientists whose work is profiled in the book have each made significant contributions to a part of the creation of modern computer science. Some are well-known: Donald Knuth, Alan Kay, Danny Hillis; others are not, although all of their contributions have been...

Who Are The Cypherpunks? This is the unauthorized telling of the revolutionary cryptography story behind the motion picture The Fifth Estate in theatres this October, and We Steal Secrets: The Story of Wikileaks, a documentary out now. WikiLeaks brought to light a new form...

First published in 1984, this user-friendly guide to the Commodore 64 helped many owners of the much-loved home computer understand their machine to a whole new level. The details within the book enabled users to take their first steps in programming machine code even...

The fascinating inside story of how the Android operating system came to be. In 2004, Android was two people who wanted to build camera software but couldn't get investors interested. Today, Android is a large team at Google, delivering an operating system (including camera...

Mechanology is the branch of knowledge that deals with the study of machines and can be described as a protologism for a social science discipline concerned with the analysis and classification of technological artifacts. In general, Mechanology recognizes the four distinct types of machine...

Automating Linguistics offers an in-depth study of the history of the mathematisation and automation of the sciences of language. In the wake of the first mathematisation of the 1930s, two waves followed: machine translation in the 1950s and the development of computational linguistics and...

When viewed through a political lens, the act of defining terms in natural language arguably transforms knowledge into values. This unique volume explores how corporate, military, academic, and professional values shaped efforts to define computer terminology and establish an information engineering profession as a...

The ZX80 home computer was launched in 1980 by the then still-to-be-knighted home computer mogul Clive Sinclair. Available in kit form at 79.99 for the aspiring hobbyist or pre-built at a price of 99.99 the ground-breaking machine offered home computing for the kind of...

The SAM Coupé was an 8-bit British home computer first released in late 1989. Designed to offer backwards compatibility with the ZX Spectrum, it was marketed as a logical upgrade for owners of the much-loved range of Sinclair machines. Originally manufactured by Miles Gordon...

The crypto wars have raged for half a century. In the 1970s, digital privacy activists prophesied the emergence of an Orwellian State, made possible by computer-mediated mass surveillance. The antidote: digital encryption. The U.S. government warned encryption would not only prevent surveillance of law-abiding...

Code Nation explores the rise of software development as a social, cultural, and technical phenomenon in American history. The movement germinated in government and university labs during the 1950s, gained momentum through corporate and counterculture experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, and became a...

Despite widespread consensus that China's digital revolution was sure to bring about massive democratic reforms, such changes have not come to pass. While scholars and policy makers alternate between predicting change and disparaging a stubbornly authoritarian regime, in this book Shaohua Guo demonstrates how...

Donald E. Knuth lived two separate lives in the late 1950s. During daylight he ran down the visible and respectable lane of mathematics. During nighttime, he trod the unpaved road of computer programming and compiler writing. Both roads intersected -- as Knuth discovered while...

This organizational history relates the role of the National Science Foundation (NSF) in the development of modern computing. Drawing upon new and existing oral histories, extensive use of NSF documents, and the experience of two of the authors as senior managers, this book describes...

This book addresses the application of computing to cultural heritage and the discipline of Digital Humanities that formed around it. Digital Humanities research is transforming how the Human record can be transmitted, shaped, understood, questioned and imagined and it has been ongoing for more...

Ada's Legacy illustrates the depth and diversity of writers, thinkers, and makers who have been inspired by Ada Lovelace, the English mathematician and writer. The volume, which commemorates the bicentennial of Ada's birth in December 1815, celebrates Lovelace's many achievements as well as the...

OpenStreetMap is the free and open wiki map of the world made by millions of volunteers who re just like you. Contributors use paper, pens, GPS devices, phones and laptops to capture the world around them (like a street name and location) and then...

The first of its kind, Journey to the Moon details the history and design of the computer that enabled U.S. astronauts to land on the moon. The book recalls the history of computer technology, both hardware and software, and the applications of digital computing...

The history of the computer is entwined with that of the modern world and most famously with the life of one man, Alan Turing. How did this device, which first appeared a mere 50 years ago, come to structure and dominate our lives so...

Launched at the peak of the legendary 1980s microcomputer rivalry, the Jupiter ACE was the most intriguing machine of them all, marketed by Jupiter Cantab. This company was founded by Richard Altwasser and Stephen Vickers - the key hardware and software designers for the...

This volume is the last of four volumes. Volume I describes the history and construction of BASIC; Volume II describes the computerisation of non-parametric statistical tests and some other statistical measures in BASIC and Volume III describes the programming of matrices and polynomials in...

Since the first computer games became available, sex has played a role in some form. But with the release of games like Playboy(R) The Mansion(TM), Leisure Suit Larry(TM) and The Singles, sexual content has gained a firm foothold and, for the first time, ventured...

If you have ever looked at a fantastic adventure or science fiction movie, or an amazingly complex and rich computer game, or a TV commercial where cars or gas pumps or biscuits behaved liked people and wondered, "How do they do that" then you've...

The Web has been with us now for almost 25 years. An integral part of our social, cultural and political lives, 'new media' is simply not that new anymore. Despite the rapidly expanding archives of information at our disposal, and the recent growth of...

On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders is an absorbing chronicle of the inventive, individualistic, and often cantankerous individuals who set the Internet free. Michael A. Banks describes how the online population created a new culture...

Much has been written about the battles that rage between software companies over market share. FoxTales is the story of one such battle, told from the perspective of a foot soldier. My perspective. When I started with Fox Software, it was a company of...

In addition to covering a history of free and open source, The Daemon, the Gnu, and the Penguin explores how free and open software is changing the world. It is authored by Peter H. Salus, a noted UNIX, open source, and Internet historian and...

Ever wonder how computer games get developed? How computer solitaire was born? How things get done in the consumer software industry? Lucky That Way by Brad Fregger is a rare, inside look at the stories behind the creation of some of the most successful...

Join retrothing.com author James Grahame as he introduces you to some dazzling devices from years past. You'll encounter hundreds of vintage and neo-retro cameras, audio components, televisions, computers, video games, vehicles, toys, electronic musical instruments and mechanical gadgets. This is a fantastic opportunity to...

Shaken by the dramatic inroads made by Japanese competitors into high-tech electronics, a number of US electronic firms joined forces in 1982 to form the first US for-profit research consortium: MCC (Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corp.). This book describes MCC's formation and the problems...

What has made Silicon Valley so productive of new technologies and new firms? How did its pioneering achievements begin--in computer networking, semiconductors, personal computing, and the Internet--and what forces have propelled its unprecedented growth? This collection of nine chapters by contributors from varied disciplines--business,...

Bootstrapping analyzes the genesis of personal computing from both technological and social perspectives, through a close study of the pathbreaking work of one researcher, Douglas Engelbart. In his lab at the Stanford Research Institute in the 1960s, Engelbart, along with a small team of...

Since its creation during the Cold War, the Internet, together with the Web, personal computers, tablets and smartphones, has ushered in one of the greatest shifts in society since the Industrial Revolution. The Digital Revolution has contributed to the world in many positive ways,...

Today, Microsoft commands the high ground of the information superhighway by owning the operating systems and basic applications programs that run on the world's 170 million computers. Beyond the unquestioned genius and vision of Bill Gates, what accounts for Microsofts astounding success? Drawing on...

Computer technology is pervasive in the modern world, its role ever more important as it becomes embedded in a myriad of physical systems and disciplinary ways of thinking. The late Michael Sean Mahoney was a pioneer scholar of the history of computing, one of...

How did the team at Microsoft pioneer, build, and shepherd the company through exponential growth in a constantly changing market? How can you apply what they've discovered to your own career? Microsoft veteran Julie Bick reveals all the insider strategieAuthor: Julie BickISBN-10: 0671034146ISBN-13: 9780671034146Publisher:...

In Go To, Steve Lohr chronicles the history of software from the early days of complex mathematical codes mastered by a few thousand to today's era of user-friendly software and over six million professional programmers worldwide. Lohr maps out the unique seductions of programming,...

He is Thomas Edison and Henry Ford rolled into one -- except that William Henry Gates III maybe smarter and more successful than either. He is America's richest man, and on the corporate landscape, he may well be the most feared. In less than...

The untold history of women and computing: how pioneering women succeeded in a field shaped by gender biases.Today, women earn a relatively low percentage of computer science degrees and hold proportionately few technical computing jobs. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the male "computer geek" seems...

Surprising tales from the scientists who first learned how to use computers to understand the workings of the human brain.Since World War II, a group of scientists has been attempting to understand the human nervous system and to build computer systems that emulate the...

At nineteen, Michael Dell started his company as a freshman at the University of Texas with $1,000 and has since built an industry powerhouse. As Dell journeys through his childhood adventures, ups and downs, and mistakes made along the way, he reflects on invaluable...

On the Way to the Web is the story of the opening of the Internet, and parallel developments in the alternate world of computer bulletin board systems. It's a chronicle of the inventive, individualistic and often cantankerous individuals who set the Internet free--and the...

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The history of the first programmable electronic computer, from its conception, construction, and use to its afterlife as a part of computing folklore.Conceived in 1943, completed in 1945, and decommissioned in 1955, ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first general-purpose programmable...

This encyclopedic reference provides a concise and engaging overview of the groundbreaking inventions and conceptual innovations that have shaped the field of computing, and the technology that runs the modern world. Each alphabetically-ordered entry presents a brief account of a pivotal innovation and the...

Changes in the present challenge us to reinterpret the past, but historians have not yet come to grips with the convergence of computing, media, and communications technology. Today these things are inextricably intertwined, in technologies such as the smartphone and internet, in convergent industries,...

This text presents an historical examination of political fact-checking, highlighting how this is part of a larger phenomenon of online scrutiny that manifests itself in multiple forms. Reflecting the long history of "fake facts" in America, the book discusses important developments in this area...

PoC or GTFO, Volume 2 follows-up the wildly popular first volume with issues 9-13 of the eponymous hacker zine. Contributions range from humorous poems to deeply technical essays. The International Journal of Proof-of-Concept or Get The Fuck Out is a celebrated magazine of reverse...