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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. Computers were invented to compute: to solve complex mathematical problems, as the dictionary still defines that word.1 They still do that, but that is not why we are living in an Information Age. That reflects other things that computers do: store and retrieve data, manage networks of communications, process text, generate and manipulate images and sounds, fly air and space craft, and so on. Deep inside a computer are circuits that do those things by transforming them into a mathematical language. But most of us never see the equations, and few of us would understand them if we did. Most of us, nevertheless, participate in this digital culture, whether by using an ATM card, composing and printing an office newsletter, calling a mail-order house on a toll-free number and ordering some clothes for next-day delivery, or shopping at a mega-mall where the inventory is replenished just-in-time. For these and many other applications, we can use all the power of this invention without ever seeing an equation. As far as the public face is concerned, computing is the least important thing that computers do. But it was to solve equations that the electronic digital computer was invented. The word computer originally meant a person who solved equations; it was only around 1945 that the name was carried over to machinery.2 That an invention should find a place in society unforeseen by its inventors is not surprising.3 The story of the computer illustrates that. It is not that the computer ended up not being used for calculationit is used for calculation by most practicing scientists and engineers today. That much, at least, the computers inventors predicted. But people found ways to get the invention to do a lot more. How they did that, transforming the mathematical engines of the 1940s to the networked information appliance of the 1990s, is the subject of this book. |
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