For centuries the mystery of the 'Terra Australis Incognita' had attracted people of many lands and cultures. The first inhabitants, driven there by hunger and more powerful enemies, had found their way to its southernmost parts, to be left there undisturbed to develop their way of life. Then, in the search for gold and spices, for souls to convert, for new lands to conquer, others were led nearer and nearer to its shores. The long quest for a Terra Australis ended in the coming of European civilization to Austral-Asia." (view table of contents)

The story of Alan Turing, World War II's secret hero, whose brilliant mathematical work resulted in the 'Enigma' machine which broke the German military code and gave the Allied forces advance knowledge of German military movements

-Ecclesiastes 12:12 Programs are invariably subjected to many rorms or transrormation. After an initial version of a program has been designed and developed, it undergoes debugging and certification. In addition, most long-lived pro­ grams have a liCe-cycle that includes modifications to meet amended specifications and extensions for expanded capabilities. Such evolution­ ary aspects of programming are the topic of this monograph. We present rormal methods for manipulating programs and illustrate their applica­ tion with numerous examples. Such methods could be incorporated in semi-automated programming environments, where they would serve to ease the burden on the programmer. We begin by describing a method whereby a given program that achieves one goal can be modified to achieve a different goal or a pro­ gram that computes wrong results can be debugged to achieve the 2 Preface intended results. The abstraction of a set of cognate programs to obtain a program schema, and the instantiation of abstract schemata to solve concrete problems, are approached from the same perspective. In addition, we describe synthesis rules for generating code from specifications and annotation rules for making assertions about code. The synthesis rules may be used when a program is first being developed, or when, in the course of modifying a program, the need arises to rewrite a program segment. Annotation rules may be used for the purpose of determining what an incorrect program really does before attempting to debug it or how a correct program works before attempting to modify it.

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Sadie Gray--the much talked-about widow of a slain U.S. president--and Allison Sterling--a top-notch reporter--both yearn for something more than the circuses their lives have become

"This volume provides a fascinating glimpse into the lives and attitudes of Irish migrants to the Seven Colonies of Australasia in the 19th century. Fitzpatrick presents a richly textured and nuanced reading of 111 letters between emigrants and 'the old country,' telling us much not only about the aspirations of emigrants, their successes and disappointments, but also about the culture and style of the correspondence itself. A substantial contribution to both Irish and Australian history."--Virginia Quarterly Review

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Product Description: Jenny McNeil had a perfect life until a baby was abandoned on her doorstep, annoying Dave Kasada moved next door and Dave's bulldog started sniffing around her poodle, Princess. Then Jenny's biological clock began to tick "loudly", Dave began to look more and more appealing and Jenny wasn't even going to think about what tricks the dogs were up to!...read more

In 1940, almost a year after the outbreak of the Second World War, Allied radio operators at an interception station in South London began picking up messages in a strange new code. They invented a machine called Colossus to decipher what turned out to be the secrets of Nazi high command. This book talks about this event.

Product Description: These proceedings derive from an international conference on the history of computing and education. This conference is the third of hopefully a series of conferences that will take place within the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and hence, we describe it as the “Third IFIP Conference on the History of Computing and Education” or simply “History of Computing and Education 3” (HCE3)...read more

Product Description: This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP TC 12 Artificial Intelligence Stream held in Milano, Italy, September 7-10, 2008. The IFIP series publishes state-of-the-art results in the sciences and technologies of information and communication...read more

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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.