Friedrich A. Kittler: Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (1986–) [DE, EN]
Filed under book | Tags: · film, history of technology, literary theory, literature, media, media archeology, media theory, poetry, psychoanalysis, sound, sound recording, technology, typewriter, writing
“Toward the end of the nineteenth century, the hegemony of the printed word was shattered by the arrival of new media technologies that offered novel ways of communicating and storing data. Previously, writing had operated by way of symbolic mediation—all data had to pass through the needle’s eye of the written signifier—but phonography, photography, and cinematography stored physical effects of the real in the shape of sound waves and light. The entire question of referentiality had to be recast in light of these new media technologies; in addition, the use of the typewriter changed the perception of writing from that of a unique expression of a literate individual to that of a sequence of naked material signifiers.
Part technological history of the emergent new media in the late nineteenth century, part theoretical discussion of the responses to these media—including texts by Rilke, Kafka, and Heidegger, as well as elaborations by Edison, Bell, Turing, and other innovators—Gramophone, Film, Typewriter analyzes this momentous shift using insights from the work of Foucault, Lacan, and McLuhan. Fusing discourse analysis, structuralist psychoanalysis, and media theory, the author adds a vital historical dimension to the current debates over the relationship between electronic literacy and poststructuralism, and the extent to which we are constituted by our technologies. The book ties the establishment of new discursive practices to the introduction of new media technologies, and it shows how both determine the ways in which psychoanalysis conceives of the psychic apparatus in terms of information machines.
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter is, among other things, a continuation as well as a detailed elaboration of the second part of the author’s Discourse Networks, 1800/1900 (Stanford, 1990). As such, it bridges the gap between Kittler’s discourse analysis of the 1980’s and his increasingly computer-oriented work of the 1990’s.”
Publisher Brinkmann & Bose, Berlin, 1986
ISBN 3922660177
427 pages
English edition
Translated, with an Introduction by Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz
Publisher Stanford University Press, 1999
ISBN 0804732337, 9780804732338
315 pages
Reviews: Bruce Clarke (Electronic Book Review, 1999), Alex Magoun (Technology and Culture, 2001).
Grammophon Film Typewriter (German, 1986, 7 MB, added on 2014-6-30, updated on 2019-5-2)
Gramophone, Film, Typewriter (English, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young and Michael Wutz, 1999, updated on 2012-10-13)
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)Steve Wozniak: The Woz Wonderbook (1977)
Filed under brochure | Tags: · 1970s, computing, history of computing, history of technology, technology
The “Woz Wonderbook” was a compilation of notes from Steve Wozniak’s filing cabinet that served as the first documentation and technical support manual for the Apple II computer (before the more famous “red book” of January 1978).
A copy donated to DigiBarn Computer Museum by Bill Goldberg, longtime Apple employee.
Scanned by David Craig.
Available in Creative Commons License permitting noncommercial use with share-alike.
PDF (added on 2014-3-6)
PDF (Alt link)