Edwin Black: IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, 2nd ed. (2001/2002)
Filed under book | Tags: · census, computing, history of computing, history of technology, holocaust, technology, war
Published to extraordinary praise, this provocative international bestseller details the story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides a chilling investigation into corporate complicity, and the atrocities witnessed raise startling questions that throw IBM’s wartime ethics into serious doubt. Edwin Black’s monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enablling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.
Publisher Dialog Press, 2001
Second edition published in 2002
ISBN 0914153102, 9780914153108
551 pages
review (Michael Hirsh, Newsweek)
review (Christopher Simpson, Washington Post)
review (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times)
review (Jack Beatty, The Atlantic)
PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
PDF (EPUB; added on 2012-7-25)
Ernst Martin: The Calculating Machines (Die Rechenmaschinen): Their History and Development (1925/1992)
Filed under book | Tags: · computing, history of computing, history of technology, machine, technology
This final volume in the Charles Babbage Institute Reprint series brings to light an extremely rare German account of the calculating machine industry in the first quarter of this century when the use of office machines became common in American and European business, government, and science.
Ernst Martin wrote Die Rechenmaschinen to address the issues and questions that the public had raised about the many calculating devices that were appearing on the market in the early 1920s. His little book is, in fact, a developmental history of calculating machines in catalog form – invaluable for collectors of old machines. The introduction describes the seven major types of machines that had been produced by 1925. The corpus of the book consists of a running list of specific calculating machines, arranged by the date the device was first patented or produced.
Stephan Weiss maintains a list of comments and corrections of the book.
Originally published in German as Die Rechenmaschinen und ihre Entwicklungsgeschichte by Johannes Meyer, Pappenheim, 1925.
Translated and edited by Peggy Aldrich Kidwell and Michael R. Williams
Publisher MIT Press, 1992
Volume 16 of The Charles Babbage Institute reprint series for the history of computing
ISBN 0262132788, 9780262132787
367 pages
publisher
google books
via rechenmaschinen-illustrated.com
PDF
View online (web version; includes machines made after 1925; maintained by Herbert Schneemann and Walter Szrek)
Mario Carpo: The Alphabet and the Algorithm (2011)
Filed under book | Tags: · algorithm, architecture, copy, history of architecture, postmodern, technology
“Digital technologies have already changed architecture—architectural form as well as the way architecture is designed and built. But if the digital is a revolution, which tradition is being revolutionized? If it is a “paradigm shift,” which architectural paradigm is shifting? In The Alphabet and the Algorithm, Mario Carpo points to one key practice of modernity: the making of identical copies. Carpo highlights two instances of identicality crucial to the shaping of modern architecture: in the fifteenth century, Leon Battista Alberti’s invention of architectural design—the humanistic idea of building as the identical replication of an author’s intentions; and, in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the mass production of identical copies from mechanical master models, matrixes, imprints, or molds.
The modern power of the identical, Carpo argues, has come to an end with the rise of digital technologies. All that is digital is variable. In architecture, this means the end of notational limitations, of mechanical standardization, and possibly of the Albertian, authorial way of building by design. Charting the rise and fall of the paradigm of identicality, Carpo compares new forms of postindustrial, digital craftsmanship to traditional hand-making, and to the cultures and technologies of variations that existed before the coming of machine-made, identical copies. Carpo reviews the unfolding of digitally based design and construction from the early 1990s to the present, and suggests a new agenda for architecture in an age of variable media, generic objects, and participatory authorship.”
Publisher MIT Press, 2011
Writing Architecture series
ISBN 0262515806, 9780262515801
190 pages
Reviews: Aureli (Architectural Review, 2011), Djalali (2011), Abrahamson (2011), Diamanti (2012), Allen (Reviews in Cultural Theory, 2014).
PDF (updated on 2020-4-23)
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