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mburnamfink 's review for:
Computing: A Concise History
by Paul E. Ceruzzi
This book definitely delivers on the "concise" part of the title, coming in a little over 150 small pages, but concision means making choices on what to exclude, and in this case, that's most of the technical detail. Ceruzzi's thesis links computing to four major concept: digital representation of characters and logic as binary 0s and 1s; the combination of data and control in a unified representation, communication between computers, and the increasing fluidity of the user interface.
Proto-computers, calculating machines of one sort or another had been around for ages, using punched cards to tabulate census data, automate business accounting, or help solve scientific problems. The Second World War revealed an astounding number of scientific problems which needed hefty numerical overhead, from code breaking to ballistic tables to the atomic bomb, and visionary engineers began thinking of a single flexible machine which had the ability to solve all these problems.
Computing did not immediately catch on after the war. The early ENIACs and similar machines were science projects that ran on thousands of balky vacuum tubes, with up times measured in hours. Even as solid state transistors replaced vacuum tubes, computers were still massively expensive installations tended by elite operators, with users submitting programs on stacks of punch cards to be run in batch. The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer was the first break away from this model, a machine cheap enough ($120k in 1960, about $1 million today) that regular people at labs could use them.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the relegation of mechanical input via punched cards in favor of much faster electronic inputs like tape decks, experiments in networking on ARPANET, and the golden bullet, the integrated circuit, which was a computer on a chip rather than painstaking assembled components on boards. Integrated circuits lead the personal computing revolution of the 1980s and the triumph of the mobile internet that we know today.
As a first pass, this book is fine, and I look forward to delving into the sources, but I think I need a complete history, rather than a concise one.
Proto-computers, calculating machines of one sort or another had been around for ages, using punched cards to tabulate census data, automate business accounting, or help solve scientific problems. The Second World War revealed an astounding number of scientific problems which needed hefty numerical overhead, from code breaking to ballistic tables to the atomic bomb, and visionary engineers began thinking of a single flexible machine which had the ability to solve all these problems.
Computing did not immediately catch on after the war. The early ENIACs and similar machines were science projects that ran on thousands of balky vacuum tubes, with up times measured in hours. Even as solid state transistors replaced vacuum tubes, computers were still massively expensive installations tended by elite operators, with users submitting programs on stacks of punch cards to be run in batch. The DEC PDP-1 minicomputer was the first break away from this model, a machine cheap enough ($120k in 1960, about $1 million today) that regular people at labs could use them.
The 1960s and 1970s saw the relegation of mechanical input via punched cards in favor of much faster electronic inputs like tape decks, experiments in networking on ARPANET, and the golden bullet, the integrated circuit, which was a computer on a chip rather than painstaking assembled components on boards. Integrated circuits lead the personal computing revolution of the 1980s and the triumph of the mobile internet that we know today.
As a first pass, this book is fine, and I look forward to delving into the sources, but I think I need a complete history, rather than a concise one.