David Edgerton: The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900 (2008)

This first ever history of technology casts aside the usual stories of inventions and focuses instead on what people actually use. It reassesses the relationship of technology and society, using unrecognised examples such as Spanish synthetic petrol, Japanese rickshaws, American gas chambers, Soviet tractors and Turkish battleships.

We do not live in an era of ever increasing change, and the most important technologies of the twenty first century are often overlooked today. Drawing on political, economic and cultural history, The Shock of the Old dispels misplaced futurism and exemplifies a radical new way of looking at our world.

Publisher Profile Books Limited, 2008
ISBN 1861973063, 9781861973061
Length 272 pages

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Rául Rojas, Ulf Hashagen (eds.): The First Computers: History and Architectures (2000)

This history of computing focuses not on chronology (what came first and who deserves credit for it) but on the actual architectures of the first machines that made electronic computing a practical reality. The book covers computers built in the United States, Germany, England, and Japan. It makes clear that similar concepts were often pursued simultaneously and that the early researchers explored many architectures beyond the von Neumann architecture that eventually became canonical. The contributors include not only historians but also engineers and computer pioneers.

An introductory chapter describes the elements of computer architecture and explains why “being first” is even less interesting for computers than for other areas of technology. The essays contain a remarkable amount of new material, even on well-known machines, and several describe reconstructions of the historic machines. These investigations are of more than simply historical interest, for architectures designed to solve specific problems in the past may suggest new approaches to similar problems in today’s machines.

Publisher MIT Press, 2000
ISBN: 0262181975, 9780262181976
471 pages

Key words and phrases
ENIAC, EDSAC, Konrad Zuse, DEHOMAG, vacuum tubes, EDVAC, IAS computer, punched tape, parametron, mantissa, magnetic drum, punched card, analog computer, John von Neumann, Manchester Mark, Zuse KG, delay lines, floating-point, lambda calculus, Howard Aiken

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David Alan Grier: When Computers Were Human (2005)

“Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term “computer” referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right. When Computers Were Human represents the first in-depth account of this little-known, 200-year epoch in the history of science and technology.

Beginning with the story of his own grandmother, who was trained as a human computer, David Alan Grier provides a poignant introduction to the wider world of women and men who did the hard computational labor of science. His grandmother’s casual remark, “I wish I’d used my calculus,” hinted at a career deferred and an education forgotten, a secret life unappreciated; like many highly educated women of her generation, she studied to become a human computer because nothing else would offer her a place in the scientific world.

The book begins with the return of Halley’s comet in 1758 and the effort of three French astronomers to compute its orbit. It ends four cycles later, with a UNIVAC electronic computer projecting the 1986 orbit. In between, Grier tells us about the surveyors of the French Revolution, describes the calculating machines of Charles Babbage, and guides the reader through the Great Depression to marvel at the giant computing room of the Works Progress Administration.

When Computers Were Human is the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community. In the end, they were rewarded by a new electronic machine that took the place and the name of those who were, once, the computers.”

Published by Princeton University Press, 2005
ISBN 0691091579, 9780691091570
411 pages

Key terms:
Mathematical Tables Project, Gertrude Blanch, Karl Pearson, Applied Mathematics Panel, Charles Henry Davis, Halley’s comet, Warren Weaver, Oswald Veblen, Wallace Eckert, Ida Rhodes, Benjamin Peirce, Charles Babbage, ENIAC, Aberdeen Proving Ground, Harvard Observatory, Lyman Briggs, John von Neumann, Bell Telephone Laboratories, human computers, Edmund Halley

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