A compact and accessible history, from punch cards and calculators
to UNIVAC and ENIAC, the personal computer, Silicon Valley, and the
Internet. The history of computing could be told as the story of
hardware and software, or the story of the Internet, or the story
of "smart" hand-held devices, with subplots involving IBM,
Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. In this concise and
accessible account of the invention and development of digital
technology, computer historian Paul Ceruzzi offers a broader and
more useful perspective. He identifies four major threads that run
throughout all of computing's technological development:
digitization-the coding of information, computation, and control in
binary form, ones and zeros; the convergence of multiple streams of
techniques, devices, and machines, yielding more than the sum of
their parts; the steady advance of electronic technology, as
characterized famously by "Moore's Law"; and the human-machine
interface. Ceruzzi guides us through computing history, telling how
a Bell Labs mathematician coined the word "digital" in 1942 (to
describe a high-speed method of calculating used in anti-aircraft
devices), and recounting the development of the punch card (for use
in the 1890 U.S. Census). He describes the ENIAC, built for
scientific and military applications; the UNIVAC, the first general
purpose computer; and ARPANET, the Internet's precursor. Ceruzzi's
account traces the world-changing evolution of the computer from a
room-size ensemble of machinery to a "minicomputer" to a desktop
computer to a pocket-sized smart phone. He describes the
development of the silicon chip, which could store ever-increasing
amounts of data and enabled ever-decreasing device size. He visits
that hotbed of innovation, Silicon Valley, and brings the story up
to the present with the Internet, the World Wide Web, and social
networking.
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