David A. Mindell: Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, cybernetics, engineering, history of computing, history of technology, industry, information theory, machine, military, networks, noise, science, technology, telephone
Today, we associate the relationship between feedback, control, and computing with Norbert Wiener’s 1948 formulation of cybernetics. But the theoretical and practical foundations for cybernetics, control engineering, and digital computing were laid earlier, between the two world wars. In Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics, David A. Mindell shows how the modern sciences of systems emerged from disparate engineering cultures and their convergence during World War II.
Mindell examines four different arenas of control systems research in the United States between the world wars: naval fire control, the Sperry Gyroscope Company, the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Vannevar Bush’s laboratory at MIT. Each of these institutional sites had unique technical problems, organizational imperatives, and working environments, and each fostered a distinct engineering culture. Each also developed technologies to represent the world in a machine.
At the beginning of World War II, President Roosevelt established the National Defense Research Committee, one division of which was devoted to control systems. Mindell shows how the NDRC brought together representatives from the four pre-war engineering cultures, and how its projects synthesized conceptions of control, communications, and computing. By the time Wiener articulated his vision, these ideas were already suffusing through engineering. They would profoundly influence the digital world.
As a new way to conceptualize the history of computing, this book will be of great interest to historians of science, technology, and culture, as well as computer scientists and theorists.
Publisher Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002
ISBN 0801868955, 9780801868955
439 pages
Mindell’s lecture about the book at MIT (video, 78 min, 2002)
Review (Larry Owens, History of Science and Technology)
Download (removed on 2014-9-18 upon request of the author)
Comment (1)John Markoff: What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (2005)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1960s, computing, counterculture, history of computing, history of technology, technology
“An unparalleled history of how technology and the counterculture came together in the 1960s, created the cult of the personal computer, and shaped today’s Silicon Valley.
Most histories of the personal computer industry focus on technology or business. John Markoff’s landmark book is about the culture and consciousness behind the first PCs—the culture being counter– and the consciousness expanded, sometimes chemically. It’s a brilliant evocation of Stanford, California, in the 1960s and ’70s, where a group of visionaries set out to turn computers into a means for freeing minds and information. In these pages one encounters Ken Kesey and the phone hacker Cap’n Crunch, est and LSD, The Whole Earth Catalog and the Homebrew Computer Lab. What the Dormouse Said is a poignant, funny, and inspiring book by one of the smartest technology writers around.”
Publisher Viking Adult
ISBN 0670033820, 9780670033829
336 pages
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
Comment (1)Slava Gerovitch: From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics (2004)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, cybernetics, history of computing, history of science, history of technology, soviet union, technology
“In this book, Slava Gerovitch argues that Soviet cybernetics was not just an intellectual trend but a social movement for radical reform in science and society as a whole. Followers of cybernetics viewed computer simulation as a universal method of problem solving and the language of cybernetics as a language of objectivity and truth. With this new objectivity, they challenged the existing order of things in economics and politics as well as in science.
The history of Soviet cybernetics followed a curious arc. In the 1950s it was labeled a reactionary pseudoscience and a weapon of imperialist ideology. With the arrival of Khrushchev’s political “thaw,” however, it was seen as an innocent victim of political oppression, and it evolved into a movement for radical reform of the Stalinist system of science. In the early 1960s it was hailed as “science in the service of communism,” but by the end of the decade it had turned into a shallow fashionable trend. Using extensive new archival materials, Gerovitch argues that these fluctuating attitudes reflected profound changes in scientific language and research methodology across disciplines, in power relations within the scientific community, and in the political role of scientists and engineers in Soviet society. His detailed analysis of scientific discourse shows how the Newspeak of the late Stalinist period and the Cyberspeak that challenged it eventually blended into “CyberNewspeak.””
Published by MIT Press, 2004
ISBN 0262572257, 9780262572255
383 pages
Key terms:
newspeak, Norbert Wiener, dialectical materialism, Soviet Union, machine translation, Moscow University, John von Neumann, structural linguistics, Stalin, Stalinist, information theory, Roman Jakobson, servomechanisms, Andrei Markov, Cold War, Andrei Kolmogorov, Liapunov, entropy, Pavlovian, BESM
PDF (updated on 2017-10-25)
Comment (1)