[Chicago] Good readings on the history of computing

[Daniel Fehrenbach]

@Randy - I had Dr. Chuck as a professor at Michigan, hope that his Coursera
stuff was as engaging as he is in person

A lot softer than a lot of things mentioned previously but Neal Stephenson
has a, really outdated but readable essay on operating system history as
seen through his experience http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html.


On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 9:39 AM, Randy Baxley <randy7771026 at gmail.com>wrote:

> This makes me wish I had unlimited time and also had my young eyes back.
>
> I lived some very good pieces of all of this.
>
> I hate to keep recommending Dr-Chuck but his course on Coursera in
> Internet History, Technology and Security is an enjoyable romp.
>
>
> On Wed, Sep 25, 2013 at 9:21 AM, Jordan Bettis <jordanb at hafd.org> wrote:
>
>> On 09/24/2013 02:40 PM, Jason Wirth wrote:
>>
>> >
>> > Does anyone have suggestion for articles on the history of computing?
>> >
>> > Note, Python specific stuff would be great but it doesn't have to be
>> > python specific, and almost by definition probably won't be.
>> >
>>
>> I can recommend a few books that I've read:
>>
>> *Computing in the Middle Ages* by Servero M Ornstein
>>
>> This guy became a programmer on a drum memory machine, went to Lincoln
>> Labs at MIT when they were building SAGE. He was part of the transition
>> from Lincoln Labs to MITRE and worked on the TX-1. He then worked on
>> LINC (Which became the PDP-8), went to BBN and worked on ArpaNet, then
>> to Xerox PARC and worked on Alto.
>>
>> The book is a memorial of his career and what it was like working on the
>> above projects.
>>
>> *Before the Computer* by James W Cortada
>> *A History of Modern Computing* by Paul E Ceruzzi
>>
>> These are two academic treatments of the subject by academic historians.
>> The first covers mechanical and electro-mechanical information
>> processing from the invention of the cash register and type writer,
>> through adding machines and ends with the creation of vacuum tube
>> computers.
>>
>> The second begins with UNIVAC and ends with the invention of the Web.
>>
>> Like I said, they're academic treatments of the subject so fairly
>> rigorously written.
>>
>> A final one I might hesitatingly recommend is:
>>
>> *The Universal History of Computing* by Georges Ifrah
>>
>> This was written in French and translated into English. The writing is
>> quite dense and it goes off into the weeds at the end, which is why I
>> hesitate to recommend it.
>>
>> But it begins with a discussion of numbering systems, and demonstrates
>> how the positional numbering system was a precondition for even thinking
>> about mathematics as something that could be done mechanically.
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>
>
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