Norbert Wiener: Invention: The Care and Feeding of Ideas (1993)

“Internationally honored for achievements throughout his career, author of Cybernetics, ExProdigy, and the essay God and Golem, Inc., which won the National Book Award in 1964, Norbert Wiener was no ordinary mathematician. With the ability to understand how things worked or might work at a very deep level, he linked his own mathematics to engineering and provided basic ideas for the design of all sorts of inventions, from radar to communications networks to computers to artificial limbs. Years after he died, the manuscript for this book was discovered among his papers. The world of science has changed greatly since Wiener’s day, and much of the change has been in the direction he warned against. Now published for the first time, this book can be read as a salutary corrective from the past and a chance to rethink the components of an environment that encourages inventiveness.

Wiener provides an insider’s understanding of the history of discovery and invention, emphasizing the historical circumstances that foster innovations and allow their application. His message is that truly original ideas cannot be produced on an assembly line, and that their consequences are often felt only at distant times and places. The intellectual and technological environment has to be right before the idea can blossom. The best course for society is to encourage the best minds to pursue the most interesting topics, and to reward them for the insights they produce. Wiener’s comments on the problem of secrecy and the importance of the “free-lance” scientist are particularly pertinent today.”

With an introduction by Steve Joshua Heims
Publisher MIT Press, 1993
ISBN 0262231670
185 pages

Publisher

DJVU (updated 2012-8-1)

John Zerzan, Alice Carnes (eds.): Questioning Technology: Tool, Toy or Tyrant? (1991)

“The rich array of commentators in this anthology looks at the way technology is waven into the fabric of our lives, and asks: is this what we really want? Questioning Technology is sharp, eloquent, and provocative.

Some of the writers fully intend to shake us up. Russell Means’ essay “Fighting Words on the Future of the Earth” is an inspired case in point. Some suggest solutions: Carolyn Merchant’s “Death of Nature” advocates a restructuring of our priorities in favor of decentralization, “soft” and labor-intensive technologies, and simpler lifestyles. All the contributors face the consequences of our technology-dependency unflichingly and often wittily.

Questioning Technology is an impassioned plea for us to think before we act – and to know that we can, if we want to, ‘unplug ourselves.'”

Publisher New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, PA, Santa Cruz, CA, and Gabriola Island, BC, 1991
ISBN 0865712042, 9780865712041
222 pages

PDF (no OCR; updated on 2012-8-4)

Boris N. Malinovsky: Pioneers of Soviet Computing (1995–) [RU, EN]

Boris N. Malinovsky’s Pioneers of Soviet Computing is the English language version of his earlier Russian language The History of Computing in Personalities (in Russian: История Вычислительной Техники в Лицах). Partly technical history and partly a memoir, it is the only existing first person account of the birth of modern computing in Russia, Ukraine, and Belarus. It chronicles the life and work of renowned Soviet computer scientists S.A. Lebedev, V.M. Glushkov, N.P. Brusentsov, I.S. Brook, and many others. It describes numerous indigenous and original Soviet computer hardware projects from the end of the Second World War through the decades that followed, interlaced with commentary on the Soviet political and social systems that constrained rapid and free technological advancement. In addition, this work reviews the various Russian and Ukrainian computing schools ranging from the highly philosophical cybernetics and artificial intelligence to the applied defense computing institutions supporting the military and weapons enterprises. The epic effort to mass produce the Unified System (ES) series of computers – based on the IBM 360 design – is described in depth, along with the political and bureaucratic intrigue and personal and technological struggles that accompanied.

Subjects: Soviet Union, USSR, Electronic Computing, Science, Defense, MESM, BESM, ES, Elbrus, Setun, Cybernetics, Control Computers, Ternary.

Publisher KIT, Kiev, 1995
ISBN 5770761318
384 pages

English edition
Edited by Anne Fitzpatrick
Translated by Emmanuel Aronie
Editorial consultant: Kate Maldonado
First published in 2006
Published electronically by SIGCIS, 2010
Creative Commons license BY-ND 3.0

Authors (via Internet Archive)
Publisher (EN)
via Aymeric Mansoux

Istroiya vychislitelnoy techniki v litsach (Russian, 1995, HTML, added on 2015-1-13)
, Pioneers of Soviet Computing (English, 2nd ed., 2006/2010)