Computer: A History of the Information Machine
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| Computer: A History of the Information Machine | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Computer science |
| Publisher | Basic Books/HarperCollins |
| Publication date | 1996 |
| ISBN | 0-465-02989-2 |
| OCLC Number | 59659328 |
| Dewey Decimal | 004/.09 20 |
| LC Classification | QA76.17 .C36 1996 |
Computer: A History of the Information Machine is a 1996 book by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray. It offers an overview of the history of computing and computer hardware, which ends with the rise of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. A 2nd edition, not described here, was published in 2004.[citation needed]
Contents |
[edit] Table of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One: Before the Computer
- 1: When Computers were People
- 2: The Mechanical Office
- 3: Babbage's Dream comes True
- Part Two: Creating the Computer
- 4: Inventing the Computer
- 5: The Computer Becomes a Business Machine
- 6: The Maturing of the Mainframe: The Rise and Fall of IBM
- Part Three: Innovation and Expansion
- 7: Real Time: Reaping the Whirlwind
- 8: Software
- 9: New Modes of Computing
- Part Four: Getting Personal
- 10: The Shaping of the Personal Computer
- 11: The Shift to Software
- 12: From the World Brain to the World Wide Web
[edit] Quotes
- During the second half of the 1980s, the joys of 'surfing the net,' began to excite the interest of people beyond the professional computer-using communities [...] However, the existing computer networks were largely in government, higher education and business. They were not a free good and were not open to hobbyists or private firms that did not have access to a host computer. To fill this gap, a number of firms such as CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and America Online sprang up to provide low cost network access [...] While these networks gave access to Internet for e-mail (typically on a pay-per-message basis), they did not give the ordinary citizen access to the full range of the Internet, or to the glories of gopherspace or the World Wide Web. In a country whose Constitution enshrines freedom of information, most of its citizens were effectively locked out of the library of the future. The Internet was no longer a technical issue, but a political one. (1996:298).
[edit] Reviews
According to the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, Campbell-Kelly and Aspray's account is "a highly readable, broad-brush picture of the development of computing, or rather of the computer industry, from its beginning to the present" which "sets a new standard for the history of computing."[1]
[edit] References
- ^ Michael S. Mahoney, Review of Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A History of the Information Machine, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 20(2):86–87, 1998.
[edit] External links
- Book citation, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) portal
- Book information, Google Books
- Book review, ACM SIGCAS Computers and Society.
- Book review, Project MUSE.
  |
This article about a computer book or series of books is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it. |
