James Essinger: Jacquard’s Web: How a Hand-Loom led to the Birth of the Information Age (2007)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, history of computing, history of technology, technology
* A fascinating look at the previously uninvestigated story of a how a loom invented 200 years ago led to the development of the computer age
* Provides a new perspective on the history of computing and information technology
* Full of interesting and colourful characters: the modest but dedicated Joseph-Marie Jacquard, the brilliant but temperamental polymath Charles Babbage, and the imaginative and perceptive Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron’s daughter
* Contains much compelling new material that has never been published for a general readership until now
Jacquard’s Web is the story of some of the most ingenious inventors the world has ever known, a fascinating account of how a hand-loom invented in Napoleonic France led to the development of the modern information age. James Essinger, a master story-teller, shows through a series of remarkable and meticulously researched historical connections (spanning two centuries and never investigated before) that the Jacquard loom kick-started a process of scientific evolution which would lead directly to the development of the modern computer.
Publisher Oxford University Press, 2007
ISBN 0192805789, 9780192805782
302 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (1)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)
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