Eniac In Action

Author : Thomas Haigh,Mark Priestley,Crispin Rope
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 366 pages
File Size : 45,9 Mb
Release : 2016-06-24
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9780262334433

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ENIAC in Action by Thomas Haigh,Mark Priestley,Crispin Rope Pdf

The history of the first programmable electronic computer, from its conception, construction, and use to its afterlife as a part of computing folklore. Conceived in 1943, completed in 1945, and decommissioned in 1955, ENIAC (the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) was the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer. But ENIAC was more than just a milestone on the road to the modern computer. During its decade of operational life, ENIAC calculated sines and cosines and tested for statistical outliers, plotted the trajectories of bombs and shells, and ran the first numerical weather simulations. ENIAC in Action tells the whole story for the first time, from ENIAC's design, construction, testing, and use to its afterlife as part of computing folklore. It highlights the complex relationship of ENIAC and its designers to the revolutionary approaches to computer architecture and coding first documented by John von Neumann in 1945. Within this broad sweep, the authors emphasize the crucial but previously neglected years of 1947 to 1948, when ENIAC was reconfigured to run what the authors claim was the first modern computer program to be executed: a simulation of atomic fission for Los Alamos researchers. The authors view ENIAC from diverse perspectives—as a machine of war, as the “first computer,” as a material artifact constantly remade by its users, and as a subject of (contradictory) historical narratives. They integrate the history of the machine and its applications, describing the mathematicians, scientists, and engineers who proposed and designed ENIAC as well as the men—and particularly the women who—built, programmed, and operated it.

Author : Thomas Haigh,Peter Mark Priestley,Mark Priestley,Crispin Rope
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 52,9 Mb
Release : 2016-02-05
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9780262033985

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ENIAC in Action by Thomas Haigh,Peter Mark Priestley,Mark Priestley,Crispin Rope Pdf

This work explores the conception, design, construction, use, and afterlife of ENIAC, the first general purpose digital electronic computer.

Author : Paul E. Ceruzzi
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 468 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2003-04-08
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 0262532034

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A History of Modern Computing, second edition by Paul E. Ceruzzi Pdf

From the first digital computer to the dot-com crash—a story of individuals, institutions, and the forces that led to a series of dramatic transformations. This engaging history covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the dot-com crash. The author concentrates on five key moments of transition: the transformation of the computer in the late 1940s from a specialized scientific instrument to a commercial product; the emergence of small systems in the late 1960s; the beginning of personal computing in the 1970s; the spread of networking after 1985; and, in a chapter written for this edition, the period 1995-2001. The new material focuses on the Microsoft antitrust suit, the rise and fall of the dot-coms, and the advent of open source software, particularly Linux. Within the chronological narrative, the book traces several overlapping threads: the evolution of the computer's internal design; the effect of economic trends and the Cold War; the long-term role of IBM as a player and as a target for upstart entrepreneurs; the growth of software from a hidden element to a major character in the story of computing; and the recurring issue of the place of information and computing in a democratic society. The focus is on the United States (though Europe and Japan enter the story at crucial points), on computing per se rather than on applications such as artificial intelligence, and on systems that were sold commercially and installed in quantities.

Author : Thomas Haigh,Paul E. Ceruzzi
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 545 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2021-09-14
Category : Technology & Engineering
ISBN : 9780262542906

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A New History of Modern Computing by Thomas Haigh,Paul E. Ceruzzi Pdf

How the computer became universal. Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific supertool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people, to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music and movies, communicate, and count their steps. In A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace these changes. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new. Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smart phones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing.

Author : Michael J. Halvorson
Publisher : Morgan & Claypool
Page : 404 pages
File Size : 40,5 Mb
Release : 2020-04-22
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9781450377553

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Code Nation by Michael J. Halvorson Pdf

Code Nation explores the rise of software development as a social, cultural, and technical phenomenon in American history. The movement germinated in government and university labs during the 1950s, gained momentum through corporate and counterculture experiments in the 1960s and 1970s, and became a broad-based computer literacy movement in the 1980s. As personal computing came to the fore, learning to program was transformed by a groundswell of popular enthusiasm, exciting new platforms, and an array of commercial practices that have been further amplified by distributed computing and the Internet. The resulting society can be depicted as a “Code Nation”—a globally-connected world that is saturated with computer technology and enchanted by software and its creation. Code Nation is a new history of personal computing that emphasizes the technical and business challenges that software developers faced when building applications for CP/M, MS-DOS, UNIX, Microsoft Windows, the Apple Macintosh, and other emerging platforms. It is a popular history of computing that explores the experiences of novice computer users, tinkerers, hackers, and power users, as well as the ideals and aspirations of leading computer scientists, engineers, educators, and entrepreneurs. Computer book and magazine publishers also played important, if overlooked, roles in the diffusion of new technical skills, and this book highlights their creative work and influence. Code Nation offers a “behind-the-scenes” look at application and operating-system programming practices, the diversity of historic computer languages, the rise of user communities, early attempts to market PC software, and the origins of “enterprise” computing systems. Code samples and over 80 historic photographs support the text. The book concludes with an assessment of contemporary efforts to teach computational thinking to young people.

Author : Chaim Gingold
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 488 pages
File Size : 53,8 Mb
Release : 2024-06-04
Category : Games & Activities
ISBN : 9780262547482

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Building SimCity by Chaim Gingold Pdf

A deep dive into the trailblazing simulation game SimCity, situating it in the history of games, simulation, and computing. Building SimCity explores the history of computer simulation by chronicling one of the most influential simulation games ever made: SimCity. As author Chaim Gingold explains, Will Wright, the visionary designer behind the urban planning game, created SimCity in part to learn about cities, appropriating ideas from traditions in which computers are used as tools for modeling and thinking about the world as a complex system. As such, SimCity is a microcosm of the histories and cultures of computer simulation that engages with questions, themes, and representational techniques that reach back to the earliest computer simulations. Gingold uses SimCity to explore a web of interrelated topics in the history of technology, software, and simulation, taking us far and wide—from the dawn of programmable computers to miniature cities made of construction paper and role-play. An unprecedented history of Maxis, the company founded to bring SimCity to market, the book reveals Maxis’s complex relations with venture capitalists, Nintendo, and the Santa Fe Institute, which shaped the evolution of Will Wright’s career; Maxis’s failure to back The Sims to completion; and the company’s sale to Electronic Arts. A lavishly visual book, Building SimCity boasts a treasure trove of visual matter to help bring its wide-ranging subjects to life, including painstakingly crafted diagrams that explain SimCity’s operation, the Kodachrome photographs taken by Charles Eames of schoolchildren making model cities, and Nintendo’s manga-style “Dr. Wright” character design, just to name a few.

Author : Ananyo Bhattacharya
Publisher : W. W. Norton & Company
Page : 368 pages
File Size : 52,7 Mb
Release : 2022-02-22
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9781324004004

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The Man from the Future: The Visionary Ideas of John von Neumann by Ananyo Bhattacharya Pdf

An electrifying biography of one of the most extraordinary scientists of the twentieth century and the world he made. The smartphones in our pockets and computers like brains. The vagaries of game theory and evolutionary biology. Nuclear weapons and self-replicating spacecrafts. All bear the fingerprints of one remarkable, yet largely overlooked, man: John von Neumann. Born in Budapest at the turn of the century, von Neumann is one of the most influential scientists to have ever lived. A child prodigy, he mastered calculus by the age of eight, and in high school made lasting contributions to mathematics. In Germany, where he helped lay the foundations of quantum mechanics, and later at Princeton, von Neumann’s colleagues believed he had the fastest brain on the planet—bar none. He was instrumental in the Manhattan Project and the design of the atom bomb; he helped formulate the bedrock of Cold War geopolitics and modern economic theory; he created the first ever programmable digital computer; he prophesized the potential of nanotechnology; and, from his deathbed, he expounded on the limits of brains and computers—and how they might be overcome. Taking us on an astonishing journey, Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed a single man to sweep through a stunningly diverse array of fields, sparking revolutions wherever he went. The Man from the Future is an insightful and thrilling intellectual biography of the visionary thinker who shaped our century.

Author : Scott McCartney
Publisher : Berkley Trade
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 40,8 Mb
Release : 2001
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : IND:30000066152400

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ENIAC by Scott McCartney Pdf

Based on original interviews with surviving participants and the first study of John Mauchly and Presper Eckert's personal papers, ENIAC tells the story of the three-year race to complete the world's first computer--and of the three-decade struggle to take credit for it. 10 illustrations.

Author : Janet Abbate,Stephanie Dick
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 473 pages
File Size : 49,6 Mb
Release : 2022-08-30
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9781421444376

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Abstractions and Embodiments by Janet Abbate,Stephanie Dick Pdf

"This anthology of original historical essays examines how social relations are enacted in and through computing using the twin frameworks of abstraction and embodiment. The book highlights a wide range of understudied contexts and experiences, such as computing and disability, working mothers as technical innovators, race and community formation, and gaming behind the Iron Curtain"--

Author : Claire L. Evans
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 288 pages
File Size : 43,6 Mb
Release : 2018-03-06
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 9780735211766

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Broad Band by Claire L. Evans Pdf

If you loved Hidden Figures or The Rise of the Rocket Girls, you'll love Claire Evans' breakthrough book on the women who brought you the internet--written out of history, until now. "This is a radically important, timely work," says Miranda July, filmmaker and author of The First Bad Man. The history of technology you probably know is one of men and machines, garages and riches, alpha nerds and brogrammers--but from Ada Lovelace, who wrote the first computer program in the Victorian Age, to the cyberpunk Web designers of the 1990s, female visionaries have always been at the vanguard of technology and innovation. In fact, women turn up at the very beginning of every important wave in technology. They may have been hidden in plain sight, their inventions and contributions touching our lives in ways we don't even realize, but they have always been part of the story. VICE reporter and YACHT lead singer Claire L. Evans finally gives these unsung female heroes their due with her insightful social history of the Broad Band, the women who made the internet what it is today. Seek inspiration from Grace Hopper, the tenacious mathematician who democratized computing by leading the charge for machine-independent programming languages after World War II. Meet Elizabeth "Jake" Feinler, the one-woman Google who kept the earliest version of the Internet online, and Stacy Horn, who ran one of the first-ever social networks on a shoestring out of her New York City apartment in the 1980s. Join the ranks of the pioneers who defied social convention to become database poets, information-wranglers, hypertext dreamers, and glass ceiling-shattering dot com-era entrepreneurs. This inspiring call to action shines a light on the bright minds whom history forgot, and shows us how they will continue to shape our world in ways we can no longer ignore. Welcome to the Broad Band. You're next.

Author : Herbert Bruderer
Publisher : Springer Nature
Page : 2072 pages
File Size : 41,6 Mb
Release : 2021-01-04
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9783030409746

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Milestones in Analog and Digital Computing by Herbert Bruderer Pdf

This Third Edition is the first English-language edition of the award-winning Meilensteine der Rechentechnik; illustrated in full color throughout in two volumes. The Third Edition is devoted to both analog and digital computing devices, as well as the world's most magnificient historical automatons and select scientific instruments (employed in astronomy, surveying, time measurement, etc.). It also features detailed instructions for analog and digital mechanical calculating machines and instruments, and is the only such historical book with comprehensive technical glossaries of terms not found in print or in online dictionaries. The book also includes a very extensive bibliography based on the literature of numerous countries around the world. Meticulously researched, the author conducted a worldwide survey of science, technology and art museums with their main holdings of analog and digital calculating and computing machines and devices, historical automatons and selected scientific instruments in order to describe a broad range of masterful technical achievements. Also covering the history of mathematics and computer science, this work documents the cultural heritage of technology as well.

Author : Thomas Haigh
Publisher : Springer
Page : 203 pages
File Size : 55,8 Mb
Release : 2019-04-30
Category : Computers
ISBN : 9783030021528

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Exploring the Early Digital by Thomas Haigh Pdf

Changes in the present challenge us to reinterpret the past, but historians have not yet come to grips with the convergence of computing, media, and communications technology. Today these things are inextricably intertwined, in technologies such as the smartphone and internet, in convergent industries, and in social practices. Yet they remain three distinct historical subfields, tilled by different groups of scholars using different tools. We often call this conglomeration “the digital,” recognizing its deep connection to the technology of digital computing. Unfortunately, interdisciplinary studies of digital practices, digital methods, or digital humanities have rarely been informed by deep engagement with the history of computing.Contributors to this volume have come together to reexamine an apparently familiar era in the history of computing through new lenses, exploring early digital computing and engineering practice as digital phenomena rather than as engines of mathematics and logic. Most focus on the period 1945 to 1960, the era in which the first electronic digital computers were created and the computer industry began to develop. Because digitality is first and foremost a way of reading objects and encoding information within them, we are foregrounding topics that have until now been viewed as peripheral in the history of computing: betting odds calculators, card file systems, program and data storage, programmable calculators, and digital circuit design practices. Reconceptualizing the “history of computing” as study of the “early digital” decenters the stored program computer, repositioning it as one of many digital technologies.

Author : Martin Campbell-Kelly,William F. Aspray,Jeffrey R. Yost,Honghong Tinn,Gerardo Con Díaz
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 375 pages
File Size : 51,8 Mb
Release : 2023-06-19
Category : History
ISBN : 9781000878752

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Computer by Martin Campbell-Kelly,William F. Aspray,Jeffrey R. Yost,Honghong Tinn,Gerardo Con Díaz Pdf

This volume provides a history of the computer which now comes properly up to the ubiquitous age, with new chapters that look at globalization, platformitization and regulation, allowing readers to engage with the more recent takeover by computers in their historical perspective. With the growing ubiquity of computers, the subject is one of interest to many students and this will feature in history of science and technology courses, and world history courses as well as ones specifically on computing. Books on the history of computing tend to be quite technically or business focused, this covers the social and cultural history as well.

Author : United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly
Publisher : Unknown
Page : 1090 pages
File Size : 55,9 Mb
Release : 1973
Category : Antitrust law
ISBN : UOM:39015078639443

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The Industrial Reorganization Act: The computer industry by United States. Congress. Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly Pdf

Author : Emil Girdan
Publisher : Emil Girdan
Page : 173 pages
File Size : 49,8 Mb
Release : 2021-02-28
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9789730337013

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Intelligence analysis in social media by Emil Girdan Pdf

The global security environment, dominated and dependent on information and communication technology, generates an accumulation of disruptive factors for society. This volume, in direct accordance with technological developments that have facilitated information avalanche and (anonymous) communication, has required interdisciplinary research in areas such as: psychology, sociology, computer science, social media communication and legislation. The research aims to establish whether social media platforms, through the actions they facilitate, can pose risks and threats to national security and to identify premises in order to stimulate strategies that should be followed to avoid transforming various forms of online communication into a potentiating and generating factor of crime, radical or extremist opinions, mass manipulation, etc. At the same time, the research offers an alternative vision on approaching the concept of intelligence in the context of the development of social media networks (SocMInt) and promotes ways to improve and streamline how to achieve objectives that can be successfully applied, including in business intelligence. In this regard, a case study is conducted on the effects of CoVid-19 pandemic (SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus) from the perspective of law enforcement agencies. Although the individually exploitation of SocMInt does not provide a comprehensive answer, it must be used in the initial stages of decision-making and effort-making, due to the low costs compared to other Int disciplines. The volume does not present a solution to current problems, but through its didactic, documentary and informative nature it offers professional support at high standards to analysts and managers in decision making.