Download or read book Seeing the Past with Computers written by Kevin Kee and published by University of Michigan Press. This book was released on 2019-01-24 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Recent developments in computer technology are providing historians with new ways to see—and seek to hear, touch, or smell—traces of the past. Place-based augmented reality applications are an increasingly common feature at heritage sites and museums, allowing historians to create immersive, multifaceted learning experiences. Now that computer vision can be directed at the past, research involving thousands of images can recreate lost or destroyed objects or environments, and discern patterns in vast datasets that could not be perceived by the naked eye. Seeing the Past with Computers is a collection of twelve thought-pieces on the current and potential uses of augmented reality and computer vision in historical research, teaching, and presentation. The experts gathered here reflect upon their experiences working with new technologies, share their ideas for best practices, and assess the implications of—and imagine future possibilities for—new methods of historical study. Among the experimental topics they explore are the use of augmented reality that empowers students to challenge the presentation of historical material in their textbooks; the application of seeing computers to unlock unusual cultural knowledge, such as the secrets of vaudevillian stage magic; hacking facial recognition technology to reveal victims of racism in a century-old Australian archive; and rebuilding the soundscape of an Iron Age village with aural augmented reality. This volume is a valuable resource for scholars and students of history and the digital humanities more broadly. It will inspire them to apply innovative methods to open new paths for conducting and sharing their own research.

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 468 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 A People s History of Computing in the United States written by Joy Lisi Rankin and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2018-10-08 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Silicon Valley gets all the credit for digital creativity, but this account of the pre-PC world, when computing meant more than using mature consumer technology, challenges that triumphalism. The invention of the personal computer liberated users from corporate mainframes and brought computing into homes. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Their networks were centered in New Hampshire, Minnesota, and Illinois, but they connected far-flung users. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto. By imagining computing as an interactive commons, the early denizens of the digital realm seeded today’s debate about whether the internet should be a public utility and laid the groundwork for the concept of net neutrality. Rankin offers a radical precedent for a more democratic digital culture, and new models for the next generation of activists, educators, coders, and makers.

Download or read book A New History of Modern Computing written by Thomas Haigh and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-09-14 with total page 545 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Recoding Gender written by Janet Abbate and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2017-09-08 with total page 259 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The untold history of women and computing: how pioneering women succeeded in a field shaped by gender biases. Today, women earn a relatively low percentage of computer science degrees and hold proportionately few technical computing jobs. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the male “computer geek” seems to be everywhere in popular culture. Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain. Indeed, programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). In Recoding Gender, Janet Abbate explores the untold history of women in computer science and programming from the Second World War to the late twentieth century. Demonstrating how gender has shaped the culture of computing, she offers a valuable historical perspective on today's concerns over women's underrepresentation in the field. Abbate describes the experiences of women who worked with the earliest electronic digital computers: Colossus, the wartime codebreaking computer at Bletchley Park outside London, and the American ENIAC, developed to calculate ballistics. She examines postwar methods for recruiting programmers, and the 1960s redefinition of programming as the more masculine “software engineering.” She describes the social and business innovations of two early software entrepreneurs, Elsie Shutt and Stephanie Shirley; and she examines the career paths of women in academic computer science. Abbate's account of the bold and creative strategies of women who loved computing work, excelled at it, and forged successful careers will provide inspiration for those working to change gendered computing culture.

Download or read book History of Computing in the Twentieth Century written by Nicholas Metropolis and published by Elsevier. This book was released on 2014-06-28 with total page 714 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History of Computing in the Twentieth Century

Download or read book John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing written by William Aspray and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 1990-12-07 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: William Aspray provides the first broad and detailed account of von Neumann's many different contributions to computing. John von Neumann (1903-1957) was unquestionably one of the most brilliant scientists of the twentieth century. He made major contributions to quantum mechanics and mathematical physics and in 1943 began a new and all-too-short career in computer science. William Aspray provides the first broad and detailed account of von Neumann's many different contributions to computing. These, Aspray reveals, extended far beyond his well-known work in the design and construction of computer systems to include important scientific applications, the revival of numerical analysis, and the creation of a theory of computing.Aspray points out that from the beginning von Neumann took a wider and more theoretical view than other computer pioneers. In the now famous EDVAC report of 1945, von Neumann clearly stated the idea of a stored program that resides in the computer's memory along with the data it was to operate on. This stored program computer was described in terms of idealized neurons, highlighting the analogy between the digital computer and the human brain. Aspray describes von Neumann's development during the next decade, and almost entirely alone, of a theory of complicated information processing systems, or automata, and the introduction of themes such as learning, reliability of systems with unreliable components, self-replication, and the importance of memory and storage capacity in biological nervous systems; many of these themes remain at the heart of current investigations in parallel or neurocomputing.Aspray allows the record to speak for itself. He unravels an intricate sequence of stories generated by von Neumann's work and brings into focus the interplay of personalities centered about von Neumann. He documents the complex interactions of science, the military, and business and shows how progress in applied mathematics was intertwined with that in computers. William Aspray is Director of the Center for the History of Electrical Engineering at The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.

Download or read book Smarter Than Their Machines written by John Cullinane and published by Morgan & Claypool Publishers. This book was released on 2014-11-01 with total page 381 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Smarter Than Their Machines: Oral Histories of the Pioneers of Interactive Computing is based on oral histories archived at the Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota. Included are the oral histories of some key pioneers of the computer industry selected by John that led to interactive computing, such as Richard Bloch, Gene Amdahl, Herbert W. Robinson, Sam Wyly, J.C.R. Licklider, Ivan Sutherland, Larry Roberts, Robert Kahn, Marvin Minsky, Michael Dertouzos, and Joseph Traub, as well as his own. John has woven them together via introductions that is, in essence, a personal walk down the computer industry road. John had the unique advantage of having been part of, or witness to, much of the history contained in these oral histories beginning as a co-op student at Arthur D. Little, Inc., in the 1950’s. Eventually, he would become a pioneer in his own right by creating the computer industry's first successful software products company (Cullinane Corporation). However, an added benefit of reading these oral histories is that they contain important messages for our leaders of today, at all levels, including that government, industry, and academia can accomplish great things when working together in an effective way. This is how the computer industry was created, which then led to the Internet, both totally unanticipated just 75 years ago.

Download or read book History of Computing Learning from the Past written by Arthur Tatnall and published by Springer. This book was released on 2010-08-06 with total page 239 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: History of Computing: Learning from the Past Why is the history of computing important? Given that the computer, as we now know it, came into existence less than 70 years ago it might seem a little odd to some people that we are concerned with its history. Isn’t history about ‘old things’? Computing, of course, goes back much further than 70 years with many earlier - vices rightly being known as computers, and their history is, of course, important. It is only the history of electronic digital computers that is relatively recent. History is often justified by use of a quote from George Santayana who famously said that: ‘Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it’. It is arguable whether there are particular mistakes in the history of computing that we should avoid in the future, but there is some circularity in this question, as the only way we will know the answer to this is to study our history. This book contains papers on a wide range of topics relating to the history of c- puting, written both by historians and also by those who were involved in creating this history. The papers are the result of an international conference on the History of Computing that was held as a part of the IFIP World Computer Congress in Brisbane in September 2010.

Download or read book Computing for Ordinary Mortals written by Robert St. Amant and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-10-29 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computing isn't only (or even mostly) about hardware and software; it's also about the ideas behind the technology. In Computing for Ordinary Mortals, computer scientist Robert St. Amant explains this "really interesting part" of computing, introducing basic computing concepts and strategies in a way that readers without a technical background can understand and appreciate. Each of the chapters illustrates ideas from a different area of computing, and together they provide important insights into what drives the field as a whole. St. Amant starts off with an overview of basic concepts as well as a brief history of the earliest computers, and then he traces two different threads through the fabric of computing. One thread is practical, illuminating the architecture of a computer and showing how this architecture makes computation efficient. St. Amant shows us how to write down instructions so that a computer can accomplish specific tasks (programming), how the computer manages those tasks as it runs (in its operating system), and how computers can communicate with each other (over a network). The other thread is theoretical, describing how computers are, in the abstract, machines for solving problems. Some of these ideas are embedded in much of what we do as humans, and thus this discussion can also give us insight into our own daily activities, how we interact with other people, and in some cases even what's going on in our heads. St. Amant concludes with artificial intelligence, exploring the possibility that computers might eventually be capable of human-level intelligence, and human-computer interaction, showing how computers can enrich our lives--and how they fall short.

Download or read book The Computing Universe written by Anthony J. G. Hey and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2015 with total page 415 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This exciting and accessible book takes us on a journey from the early days of computers to the cutting-edge research of the present day that will shape computing in the coming decades. It introduces a fascinating cast of dreamers and inventors who brought these great technological developments into every corner of the modern world, and will open up the universe of computing to anyone who has ever wondered where his or her smartphone came from.

Download or read book Past Present Parallel written by Arthur Trew and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Past, Present, Parallel is a survey of the current state of the parallel processing industry. In the early 1980s, parallel computers were generally regarded as academic curiosities whose natural environment was the research laboratory. Today, parallelism is being used by every major computer manufacturer, although in very different ways, to produce increasingly powerful and cost-effec- tive machines. The first chapter introduces the basic concepts of parallel computing; the subsequent chapters cover different forms of parallelism, including descriptions of vector supercomputers, SIMD computers, shared memory multiprocessors, hypercubes, and transputer-based machines. Each section concentrates on a different manufacturer, detailing its history and company profile, the machines it currently produces, the software environments it supports, the market segment it is targetting, and its future plans. Supplementary chapters describe some of the companies which have been unsuccessful, and discuss a number of the common software systems which have been developed to make parallel computers more usable. The appendices describe the technologies which underpin parallelism. Past, Present, Parallel is an invaluable reference work, providing up-to-date material for commercial computer users and manufacturers, and for researchers and postgraduate students with an interest in parallel computing.

Download or read book Ideas That Created the Future written by Harry R. Lewis and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 518 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Classic papers by thinkers ranging from from Aristotle and Leibniz to Norbert Wiener and Gordon Moore that chart the evolution of computer science. Ideas That Created the Future collects forty-six classic papers in computer science that map the evolution of the field. It covers all aspects of computer science: theory and practice, architectures and algorithms, and logic and software systems, with an emphasis on the period of 1936-1980 but also including important early work. Offering papers by thinkers ranging from Aristotle and Leibniz to Alan Turing and Nobert Wiener, the book documents the discoveries and inventions that created today's digital world. Each paper is accompanied by a brief essay by Harry Lewis, the volume's editor, offering historical and intellectual context.

Download or read book CoCo written by Boisy G Pitre and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2013-12-10 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: CoCo: The Colorful History of Tandy’s Underdog Computer is the first book to document the complete history of the Tandy Color Computer (CoCo), a popular 8-bit PC series from the 1980s that competed against the era’s biggest names, including the Apple II, IBM PC, and Commodore 64. The book takes you inside the interesting stories and people behind this unique, underdog computer. Both noted computer science and technology advocates, authors Pitre and Loguidice reveal the story of a pivotal period in the home computing revolution from the perspective of Tandy’s CoCo. As these computers were sold in Radio Shack stores throughout the United States and other countries, they provide a critical point of reference for key events in the unprecedented evolutionary period for the PC industry in the 1980s. The book also features first-hand accounts from the people who created and promoted the CoCo, from the original Tandy executives and engineers to today’s active product creators and information keepers. The CoCo impacted many lives, and this book leaves no stone unturned in recounting this fascinating slice of the PC revolution that is still in play today. From early telecommunications experiments to engineering and budgetary challenges, it covers all the aspects that made the CoCo a truly personal, useful computing experience in as small and inexpensive a package as possible.

Download or read book Computing the News written by Sylvain Parasie and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-10-11 with total page 169 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Faced with a full-blown crisis, a growing number of journalists are engaging in seemingly unjournalistic practices such as creating and maintaining databases, handling algorithms, or designing online applications. “Data journalists” claim that these approaches help the profession demonstrate greater objectivity and fulfill its democratic mission. In their view, computational methods enable journalists to better inform their readers, more closely monitor those in power, and offer deeper analysis. In Computing the News, Sylvain Parasie examines how data journalists and news organizations have navigated the tensions between traditional journalistic values and new technologies. He traces the history of journalistic hopes for computing technology and contextualizes the surge of data journalism in the twenty-first century. By importing computational techniques and ways of knowing new to journalism, news organizations have come to depend on a broader array of human and nonhuman actors. Parasie draws on extensive fieldwork in the United States and France, including interviews with journalists and data scientists as well as a behind-the-scenes look at several acclaimed projects in both countries. Ultimately, he argues, fulfilling the promise of data journalism requires the renewal of journalistic standards and ethics. Offering an in-depth analysis of how computing has become part of the daily practices of journalists, this book proposes ways for journalism to evolve in order to serve democratic societies.

Download or read book Milestones in Analog and Digital Computing written by Herbert Bruderer and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2021-01-04 with total page 2072 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Beyond Calculation written by Peter J. Denning and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In March 1997, the Association for Computing Machinery celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of the electronic computer. Computers are everywhere: in our cars, our homes, our supermarkets, at the office, and at the local hospital. But as the contributors to this volume make clear, the scientific, social and economic impact of computers is only now beginning to be felt. These sixteen invited essays on the future of computing take on a dazzling variety of topics, with opinions from such experts as Gordon Bell, Sherry Turkle, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Paul Abraham, Donald Norman, Franz Alt, and David Gelernter. This brilliantly eclectic collection will fascinate everybody with an interest in computers and where they are leading us.