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The history of the computer is entwined with that of the modern
world and with the life of one man, the brilliant but troubled Alan
Turing. How did the computer come to structure and dominate our
lives so totally? In Jon Agar's enlightening story of the
`universal machine', we discover how Turing's groundbreaking work
not only helped break German codes during the Second World War but
also founded the beginnings of the modern computer. Persecuted by
the authorities for his homosexuality, and ultimately hounded to
suicide, Turing's personal tribulations are as relevant to the
modern world as his work on computing, as indicated by his
posthumous royal pardon of 2013 and the recent film The Imitation
Game, which focuses on Turing's turbulent life.
An examination of technology and politics in the evolution of the
British "government machine." In The Government Machine, Jon Agar
traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom
from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues
that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert
movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise.
The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over
state action-a revolutionary move. Agar shows how mechanization
followed the popular depiction of government as machine-like, with
British civil servants cast as components of a general purpose
"government machine"; indeed, he argues that today's general
purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil servant. Over the
course of two centuries, government has become the major repository
and user of information; the Civil Service itself can be seen as an
information-processing entity. Agar argues that the changing
capacities of government have depended on the implementation of new
technologies, and that the adoption of new technologies has
depended on a vision of government and a fundamental model of
organization. Thus, to study the history of technology is to study
the state, and vice versa.
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