Blending strong narrative history and a fascinating look at the interface of business and technology, Computer: A History of the Information Machine traces the dramatic story of the invention of the computer. More than just the tale of a tool created by scientists to crunch numbers, this book suggests a richer story behind the computer’s creation, one that shows how business and government were the first to explore the unlimited potential of the machine as an information processor. Not surprisingly, at the heart of the business story is IBM. A story of old-fashioned entreprenuership in symbiotic relationship with scientific know-how, it begins way back when ”computers” were people who did the computational work of scientists, and Charles Babbage attempted in vain to mechanize the process. But it also shows how entrepreneurs like Herman Hollerith, seeing a business opportunity in a machine that could mechanically tabulate the U.S. census, created a punched-card tabulator that became the technology that created IBM.The authors show how ENIAC, the first fully electronic computer, emerged out of the wartime need of the military for computers that performed at lightning speed and did not need human intervention at any stage of the process. Most interesting is the story of how the computer began to reshape broad segments of our society when the PC enabled new modes of computing that liberated people from dependence on room-sized, enormously expensive mainframe computers. Filled with lively insights—many about the world of computing in the 1990s, such as the strategy behind Microsoft Windows—as well as a discussion of the rise and creation of the World Wide Web, here is a book no one who owns or uses a computer will want to miss.

This book provides an introductory overview to all of the major policy issues in the United States related to information technology. These issues include federal funding of research that helped to create the Internet; telecommunications issues such as regulations about wireless technologies; computer security and homeland defense; governance and use of the Internet such as spam, viruses, electronic voting, taxation of online commerce, and child pornography; privacy; intellectual property issues such as copyright infringement related to peer-to-peer sharing of music and video files, or trademark infringement through the misuse of domain names (cybersquatting); antitrust in the software industry; uneven access to information technology in poor, rural, and minority communities (Digital Divide); and visas for foreign workers. Every chapter identifies the main players, the history of legislation and court cases in this area, and describes recent events. Accessible and interesting to both policy people and technical computing people, as well as to any computer user or IT worker who wanted a general understanding of these issues. The book will help policy people, most of whom are generalists, to understand the basic issues of IT policy. The book will also help IT professionals to understand the process by which their technology is politically controlled.

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Product Description: Historian of technology William Aspray interviews 13 senior executives from important technological companies in Germany, Japan, and the US, learning about their management philosophies, the problems they confront in their work, and the importance of having an engineering background...read more

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Product Description: History and Philosophy of Modern Mathematics was first published in 1988. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions...read more

Product Description: Coming before the establishment of professional journals, societies, or regular meetings in computer science, the proceedings of the symposium offer the best picture of computing technology in the early years that we have available...read more