David Alan Grier: Too Soon to Tell: Essays for the End of the Computer Revolution (2009)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, engineering, history of computing, history of technology, technology
Based on author David A. Grier’s column “In Our Time,” which runs monthly in Computer magazine, Too Soon To Tell presents a collection of essays skillfully written about the computer age, an era that began February 1946. Examining ideas that are both contemporary and timeless, these chronological essays examine the revolutionary nature of the computer, the relation between machines and human institutions, and the connections between fathers and sons to provide general readers with a picture of a specific technology that attempted to rebuild human institutions in its own image.
Publisher Wiley-IEEE, 2009
ISBN 0470080353, 9780470080351
238 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (1)Doron Swade: The Difference Engine: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (2001)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, history of computing, history of mathematics, history of technology, mathematics
In 1821 an inventor and mathematician named Charles Babbage was reviewing a set of mathematical tables. After finding an excess of errors in the results, he exclaimed, “I wish to God these calculations had been executed by steam.” Thus began Babbage’s lifelong enterprise to design and build a mechanical calculating engine-the world’s first computer. Drawing on Babbage’s original notes and designs, Doron Swade recounts both Babbage’s nineteenth-century quest to build a calculating machine-the Difference Engine-and Swade’s own successful attempt to build a replica for the bicentennial of Babbage’s birth. Set against the tantalizing background of Victorian science and politics with a colorful cast of characters, The Difference Engineis a saga of ingenuity and will-and the dawning of a new age.
Publisher Penguin Books, 2001
ISBN 0670910201
342 pages
PDF (DJVU; updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (1)Herman H. Goldstine: The Computer from Pascal to von Neumann (1972/1993)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, history of computing, history of technology, technology
In 1942, Lt. Herman H. Goldstine, a former mathematics professor, was stationed at the Moore School of Electrical Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. It was there that he assisted in the creation of the ENIAC, the first electronic digital computer. The ENIAC was operational in 1945, but plans for a new computer were already underway. The principal source of ideas for the new computer was John von Neumann, who became Goldstine’s chief collaborator. Together they developed EDVAC, successor to ENIAC. After World War II, at the Institute for Advanced Study, they built what was to become the prototype of the present-day computer. Herman Goldstine writes as both historian and scientist in this first examination of the development of computing machinery, from the seventeenth century through the early 1950s. His personal involvement lends a special authenticity to his narrative, as he sprinkles anecdotes and stories liberally through his text.
Publisher Princeton University Press, 1993
ISBN 0691023670, 9780691023670
PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (1)