Download or read book A Few Good Men from Univac written by David E. Lundstrom and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Knowing Machines written by Donald A. MacKenzie and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The essays are tied together by their explorations of connections (primarily among technology, society, and knowledge) and by their general focus on modern "high" technology. They also share an emphasis on the complexity of technological formation and fixation and on the role of belief (especially self-validating belief) in technological change.
Download or read book The Univac Corporation written by Stephen H. Kaisler and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2021-11-16 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Univac Corporation (now Unisys) has been an innovator in computer systems since the early 1960s. Univac (then Remington Rand), built the first commercial computer, the Univac I. This volume continues the story of Univac (later Unisys) computer systems from the Univac 1105. Its successors—the early Univac 1100 machines—helped to establish the concept of a family of computer systems. It was one of the first to develop and deploy a multidimensional operating system that supported interactive, real-time, and batch processing. Ease of access and operation in all modes was especially attractive to scientific and academic communities. It was instrumental in developing COBOL and DMS-1100 for business data processing. The upward compatibility of the Univac 1100 series machines from the Univac 1107 to the Sperry 2200 series demonstrated how evolutionary development could protect its customer’s investment while continually enhancing performance. As one of the founders of the computing industry, Univac has survived over 60 years of expansion and consolidation to survive as part of Unisys as one of the two remaining mainframe manufacturers.
Download or read book Makin Numbers written by I. Bernard Cohen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 346 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of technical essays and reminiscences is a companion to I. Bernard Cohen's biography Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer. After an overview by Cohen, Part I presents the complete publication of Aiken's 1937 proposal for an automatic calculating machine, later realized as the Mark I, as well as recollections by the chief engineer in charge of construction of Mark II, Robert Campbell, and the programmer of Mark I, Richard Bloch. Henry Tropp describes Aiken's hostility to the exclusive use of binary numbers in computational systems and his alternative approach.
Download or read book Computers and Commerce written by Arthur Lawrence Norberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 366 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Both ERA and EMCC had their roots in World War II, and in postwar years both firms received major funding from the United States government. Norberg analyzes the interaction between the two companies and the government and examines the impact of this institutional context on technological innovation. He looks at the two firms' operations after 1951 as independent subsidiaries of Remington Rand, and documents the management problems that began after Remington Rand merged with Sperry Gyroscope to form Sperry Rand in 1955"--Jacket.
Download or read book Making IT Work written by Jeffrey R. Yost and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-10-13 with total page 371 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The evolution of the multi-billion-dollar computer services industry, from consulting and programming to data analytics and cloud computing, with case studies of important companies. The computer services industry has worldwide annual revenues of nearly a trillion dollars and employs millions of workers, but is often overshadowed by the hardware and software products industries. In this book, Jeffrey Yost shows how computer services, from consulting and programming to data analytics and cloud computing, have played a crucial role in shaping information technology—in making IT work. Tracing the evolution of the computer services industry from the 1950s to the present, Yost provides case studies of important companies (including IBM, Hewlett Packard, Andersen/Accenture, EDS, Infosys, and others) and profiles of such influential leaders as John Diebold, Ross Perot, and Virginia Rometty. He offers a fundamental reinterpretation of IBM as a supplier of computer services rather than just a producer of hardware, exploring how IBM bundled services with hardware for many years before becoming service-centered in the 1990s. Yost describes the emergence of companies that offered consulting services, data processing, programming, and systems integration. He examines the development of industry-defining trade associations; facilities management and the firm that invented it, Ross Perot's EDS; time sharing, a precursor of the cloud; IBM's early computer services; and independent contractor brokerages. Finally, he explores developments since the 1980s: the transformations of IBM and Hewlett Packard; the offshoring of enterprises and labor; major Indian IT service providers and the changing geographical deployment of U.S.-based companies; and the paradigm-changing phenomenon of cloud service.
Download or read book The Outsourcer written by Dinesh C. Sharma and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-03-06 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of how India became a major player in the global technology industry, mapping technological, economic, and political transformations.
Download or read book Howard Aiken written by I. Bernard Cohen and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2000 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Biography of Howard Aiken, a major figure of the early digital era, by a major historian of science who was also a colleague of Aiken's at Harvard. Howard Hathaway Aiken (1900-1973) was a major figure of the early digital era. He is best known for his first machine, the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator or Harvard Mark I, conceived in 1937 and put into operation in 1944. But he also made significant contributions to the development of applications for the new machines and to the creation of a university curriculum for computer science. This biography of Aiken, by a major historian of science who was also a colleague of Aiken's at Harvard, offers a clear and often entertaining introduction to Aiken and his times. Aiken's Mark I was the most intensely used of the early large-scale, general-purpose automatic digital computers, and it had a significant impact on the machines that followed. Aiken also proselytized for the computer among scientists, scholars, and businesspeople and explored novel applications in data processing, automatic billing, and production control. But his most lasting contribution may have been the students who received degrees under him and then took prominent positions in academia and industry. I. Bernard Cohen argues convincingly for Aiken's significance as a shaper of the computer world in which we now live.
Download or read book Strategic Computing written by Alex Roland and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The story of the U.S. Department of Defense's extraordinary effort, in the period from 1983 to 1993, to achieve machine intelligence.
Download or read book Programmed Inequality written by Mar Hicks and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book ENIAC in Action written by Thomas Haigh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2016-06-24 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Building IBM written by Emerson W. Pugh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2009-01-23 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No company of the twentieth century achieved greater success and engendered more admiration, respect, envy, fear, and hatred than IBM. Building IBM tells the story of that company—how it was formed, how it grew, and how it shaped and dominated the information processing industry. Emerson Pugh presents substantial new material about the company in the period before 1945 as well as a new interpretation of the postwar era.Granted unrestricted access to IBM's archival records and with no constraints on the way he chose to treat the information they contained, Pugh dispels many widely held myths about IBM and its leaders and provides new insights on the origins and development of the computer industry.Pugh begins the story with Herman Hollerith's invention of punched-card machines used for tabulating the U.S. Census of 1890, showing how Hollerith's inventions and the business he established provided the primary basis for IBM. He tells why Hollerith merged his company in 1911 with two other companies to create the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company, which changed its name in 1924 to International Business Machines. Thomas J. Watson, who was hired in 1914 to manage the merged companies, exhibited remarkable technological insight and leadership—in addition to his widely heralded salesmanship—to build Hollerith's business into a virtual monopoly of the rapidly growing punched-card equipment business. The fascinating inside story of the transfer of authority from the senior Watson to his older son, Thomas J. Watson Jr., and the company's rapid domination of the computer industry occupy the latter half of the book. In two final chapters, Pugh examines conditions and events of the 1970s and 1980s and identifies the underlying causes of the severe probems IBM experienced in the 1990s.
Download or read book The Computer Boys Take Over written by Nathan L. Ensmenger and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2012-08-24 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contentious history of the computer programmers who developed the software that made the computer revolution possible. This is a book about the computer revolution of the mid-twentieth century and the people who made it possible. Unlike most histories of computing, it is not a book about machines, inventors, or entrepreneurs. Instead, it tells the story of the vast but largely anonymous legions of computer specialists—programmers, systems analysts, and other software developers—who transformed the electronic computer from a scientific curiosity into the defining technology of the modern era. As the systems that they built became increasingly powerful and ubiquitous, these specialists became the focus of a series of critiques of the social and organizational impact of electronic computing. To many of their contemporaries, it seemed the “computer boys” were taking over, not just in the corporate setting, but also in government, politics, and society in general. In The Computer Boys Take Over, Nathan Ensmenger traces the rise to power of the computer expert in modern American society. His rich and nuanced portrayal of the men and women (a surprising number of the “computer boys” were, in fact, female) who built their careers around the novel technology of electronic computing explores issues of power, identity, and expertise that have only become more significant in our increasingly computerized society. In his recasting of the drama of the computer revolution through the eyes of its principle revolutionaries, Ensmenger reminds us that the computerization of modern society was not an inevitable process driven by impersonal technological or economic imperatives, but was rather a creative, contentious, and above all, fundamentally human development.
Download or read book Productivity Machines written by Corinna Schlombs and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-10-01 with total page 365 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How productivity culture and technology became emblematic of the American economic system in pre- and postwar Germany. The concept of productivity originated in a statistical measure of output per worker or per work-hour, calculated by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics. A broader productivity culture emerged in 1920s America, as Henry Ford and others linked methods of mass production and consumption to high wages and low prices. These ideas were studied eagerly by a Germany in search of economic recovery after World War I, and, decades later, the Marshall Plan promoted productivity in its efforts to help post–World War II Europe rebuild. In Productivity Machines, Corinna Schlombs examines the transatlantic history of productivity technology and culture in the two decades before and after World War II. She argues for the interpretive flexibility of productivity: different groups viewed productivity differently at different times. Although it began as an objective measure, productivity came to be emblematic of the American economic system; post-World War II West Germany, however, adapted these ideas to its own political and economic values. Schlombs explains that West German unionists cast a doubtful eye on productivity's embrace of plant-level collective bargaining; unions fought for codetermination—the right to participate in corporate decisions. After describing German responses to US productivity, Schlombs offers an in-depth look at labor relations in one American company in Germany—that icon of corporate America, IBM. Finally, Schlombs considers the emergence of computer technology—seen by some as a new symbol of productivity but by others as the means to automate workers out of their jobs.
Download or read book Biographies of Scientists for Sci Tech Libraries written by Tony Stankus and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-12-05 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book, first published in 1991, is an invaluable guide to biographies of scientists from a wide variety of scientific fields. The books selected for this highly descriptive bibliography help librarians shatter readers’ stereotypes of scientists as monomaniacal and uninteresting people by providing interesting and provocative titles to capture the interest of students and other readers. The biographies included in this very special bibliography were carefully selected for their humour and human insights to give future scientists encouragement, inspiration, and an understanding of the origins of particular scientific fields. These biographies are unique in that they explore the whole personality of the scientist, giving students a glimpse at the variety and drama of the lives beyond well-known contributions or Nobel prize accomplishments.
Download or read book A History of Modern Computing second edition written by Paul E. Ceruzzi and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-04-08 with total page 461 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Computer Revolution in Canada written by John N. Vardalas and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2001-07-27 with total page 421 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The forces that shaped Canada's digital innovations in the postwar period. After World War II, other major industrialized nations responded to the technological and industrial hegemony of the United States by developing their own design and manufacturing competence in digital electronic technology. In this book John Vardalas describes the quest for such competence in Canada, exploring the significant contributions of the civilian sector but emphasizing the role of the Canadian military in shaping radical technological change. As he shows, Canada's determination to be an active participant in research and development work on advanced weapons systems, and in the testing of those weapons systems, was a cornerstone of Canadian technological development during the years 1945-1980. Vardalas presents case studies of such firms as Ferranti-Canada, Sperry Gyroscope of Canada, and Control Data of Canada. In contrast to the standard nationalist interpretation of Canadian subsidiaries of transnational corporations as passive agents, he shows them to have been remarkably innovative and explains how their aggressive programs to develop all-Canadian digital R&D and manufacturing capacities influenced technological development in the United States and in Great Britain. While underlining the unprecedented role of the military in the creation of peacetime scientific and technical skills, Vardalas also examines the role of government and university research programs, including Canada's first computerized systems for mail sorting and airline reservations. Overall, he presents a nuanced account of how national economic, political, and corporate forces influenced the content, extent, and direction of digital innovation in Canada.
