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)

Stewart Brand (ed.): Whole Earth Catalog (1968-1998) & Whole Earth Software Catalog & Review (1984-1986)

The Whole Earth Catalog was an American counterculture catalog published by Stewart Brand between 1968 and 1972, and occasionally thereafter, until 1998. Although the WECs listed all sorts of products for sale (clothing, books, tools, machines, seeds – things useful for a creative or self-sustainable lifestyle) the Whole Earth Catalogs themselves did not sell any of the products. Instead the vendors and their prices were listed right alongside with the items. This led to a need for the Catalogs to be frequently updated. (source)

The Whole Earth Software Catalog and The Whole Earth Software Review (1984-1985) were two publications produced by Stewart Brand’s Point Foundation as an extension of The Whole Earth Catalog.

The Catalog and Review were notable for being “devoid of any industry advertising” and for being “accessible and user friendly – written in an glib, conversational style that takes most of the bugs out of microprocessing.”

Fred Turner discusses the production and eventual demise of both the Catalog and Review in From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism. Turner notes that in 1983, The Whole Earth Software Catalog was proposed by John Brockman as a magazine which “would do for computing what the original [Whole Earth Catalog] had done for the counterculture: identify and recommend the best tools as they emerged.”

Brand announced the first publication of the quarterly Whole Earth Software Review at the SoftCon trade show at the Louisiana Superdome in New Orleans in March 1984. While both were published as an extension of Whole Earth, the Catalog was a large glossy book sponsored by Doubleday and published in Sausalito California while the Review was a small periodical published in San Diego.

The Whole Earth Software Catalog and Review were both business failures. The Catalog was only published twice (1.0 in June and 2.0 in Fall ’85), with only three of The Whole Earth Software Review supplements published. (source)

Wikipedia (WEC)
Wikipedia (WESC & WESR)

Whole Earth Catalog, Fall 1968
Whole Earth Catalog, Spring 1969 (added on 2016-8-24)
The Last Whole Earth Catalog, 1971 (79 MB, added on 2020-4-14)
The Essential Whole Earth Catalog, 1986 (126 MB, added on 2020-4-15)
Whole Earth Software Catalog 1.0, 1984 (updated on 2012-7-18)
View online (incl. other issues)
Electronic Whole Earth Catalog (CD-ROM on Internet Archive, added on 2020-7-16)

See also:
Access to Tools: Publications from the Whole Earth Catalog, 1968-1974, online companion to 2011 exhibition at MoMA;
Index to the Internet Archive’s Whole Earth Collection, compiled by Robert Horvitz (added on 2018-8-18).

David Golumbia: The Cultural Logic of Computation (2009)

Advocates of computers make sweeping claims for their inherently transformative power: new and different from previous technologies, they are sure to resolve many of our existing social problems, and perhaps even to cause a positive political revolution.

In The Cultural Logic of Computation, David Golumbia, who worked as a software designer for more than ten years, confronts this orthodoxy, arguing instead that computers are cultural “all the way down”—that there is no part of the apparent technological transformation that is not shaped by historical and cultural processes, or that escapes existing cultural politics. From the perspective of transnational corporations and governments, computers benefit existing power much more fully than they provide means to distribute or contest it. Despite this, our thinking about computers has developed into a nearly invisible ideology Golumbia dubs “computationalism”—an ideology that informs our thinking not just about computers, but about economic and social trends as sweeping as globalization.

Driven by a programmer’s knowledge of computers as well as by a deep engagement with contemporary literary and cultural studies and poststructuralist theory, The Cultural Logic of Computation provides a needed corrective to the uncritical enthusiasm for computers common today in many parts of our culture.

Publisher Harvard University Press, 2009
ISBN 0674032926, 9780674032927
Length 257 pages

review (Marilyn Lombardi)
review (Rob Horning)

publisher
google books

PDF (DJVU)