“My lecture on “dangerous s-curves” was created specifically to talk about the adoption of electronic digital computing technology, and in particular the personal computer. It is easy to interpret the history of the PC as a part of a “changing pace of technology” argument — but only if you ignore the many decades of technological […]
Computing is taken for granted in our post-PC world, in which we are increasingly surrounded by a multitude of smart devices. But did you know that computing and our quest to build intelligent machines is essentially a human narrative and a stunni…
Always on the lookout for good books dealing with the history of computing, I was pleased to see this week the announcement of Eden Medina’s new book, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011). Not only does Eden happen to be a friend of mine, but her book is a welcome […]
Always on the lookout for good books dealing with the history of computing, I was pleased to see this week the announcement of Eden Medina’s new book, Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile (MIT Press, 2011). Not only does Eden happen to be a friend of mine, but her book is a welcome […]
A couple of years ago I wrote an essay for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing entitled “Software as History Embodied” in which I addressed the tongue-in-cheek question, first posed by the Princeton historian Michael Mahoney, of “what makes the history of software so hard?” Mahoney himself, of course, was playing on an […]
A couple of years ago I wrote an essay for the IEEE Annals of the History of Computing entitled “Software as History Embodied” in which I addressed the tongue-in-cheek question, first posed by the Princeton historian Michael Mahoney, of “what makes the history of software so hard?” Mahoney himself, of course, was playing on an […]