Product Description: Before Palm Pilots and iPods, PCs and laptops, the term "computer" referred to the people who did scientific calculations by hand. These workers were neither calculating geniuses nor idiot savants but knowledgeable people who, in other circumstances, might have become scientists in their own right...read more

Product Description: Charles Babbage was thirty years old in 1821, as was his close friend, John Herschel, and in English intellectual circles they were both regarded as brilliant mathematicians. One day as Babbage worked in preparing logarithmic tables, a tedious and boring task, he commented to Herschel that he thought he could invent a machine to do these calculations with far more speed and accuracy than a human calculator could...read more

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Product Description: The first attempts to mechanize the production of numerical tables were remarkable in conception coming at a time when a "computer" was in fact a person rather than a machine. This book is the first to provide a unified picture of the difference engines that were the mechanical predecessors of today's digital computer, to emphasize them as part of the history of numerical tables, and to give equal weight to the technical and social aspects of their creation...read more

Traces the life of Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, describes her mathematical education, and assesses her contributions to computer science

Product Description: Volume 10 in the Babbage Reprint Series contains two archival papers by Alan Turing-the ACE report (1945), a seminal paper detailing the design for an electronic universal machine called the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), and Turing's Lecture to the London Mathematical Society (1947) amplifying the ideas outlined in the ACE report...read more