The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Book Cover for: A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh

A New History of Modern Computing

Thomas Haigh

How the computer became universal.

Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific supertool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people, to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music and movies, communicate, and count their steps. In A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace these changes. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new.

Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smart phones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing.

Book Details

  • Publisher: MIT Press
  • Publish Date: Sep 14th, 2021
  • Pages: 544
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 9.90in - 6.80in - 1.40in - 2.35lb
  • EAN: 9780262542906
  • Categories: Social AspectsHistoryComputer Science

More books to explore

Book Cover for: The Alignment Problem: Machine Learning and Human Values, Brian Christian
Book Cover for: Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention--And How to Think Deeply Again, Johann Hari
Book Cover for: Palo Alto: A History of California, Capitalism, and the World, Malcolm Harris
Book Cover for: The Coming Wave: Technology, Power, and the Twenty-First Century's Greatest Dilemma, Mustafa Suleyman
Book Cover for: The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John Von Neumann, Ananyo Bhattacharya
Book Cover for: You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All, Adrian Hon
Book Cover for: Psychonauts: Drugs and the Making of the Modern Mind, Mike Jay
Book Cover for: Artificial Intelligence: A Guide for Thinking Humans, Melanie Mitchell
Book Cover for: Blockchain Chicken Farm: And Other Stories of Tech in China's Countryside, Xiaowei Wang
Book Cover for: The Transcendent Brain: Spirituality in the Age of Science, Alan Lightman
Book Cover for: The Art of More: How Mathematics Created Civilization, Michael Brooks
Book Cover for: The Idealist: Aaron Swartz and the Rise of Free Culture on the Internet, Justin Peters
Book Cover for: Like, Comment, Subscribe: Inside Youtube's Chaotic Rise to World Domination, Mark Bergen
Book Cover for: Coders: The Making of a New Tribe and the Remaking of the World, Clive Thompson
Book Cover for: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Walter Isaacson

About the Author

Thomas Haigh is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Comenius Visiting Professor at the University of Siegen, and the coauthor of ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer (MIT Press). Paul E. Ceruzzi is Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum and the author of Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner,1945-2005, Computing: A Concise History (both published by the MIT Press), and other books.

More books by Thomas Haigh

Book Cover for: Eniac in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer /]cthomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, and Crispin Rope, Thomas Haigh
Book Cover for: The Theory And Practice Of Latin Inflection, Being Examples In The Form Of Copybooks For Declining Nouns And Verbs, Etc, Thomas Haigh
Book Cover for: Introduction To The Diurnal Readings, Being Choice Pieces, In Prose And Verse, Adapted To The Capacities Of Youth, Thomas Haigh

Praise for this book

"Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi's new version has been updated for a new generation in such a way that it will assuredly still be the standard by which other general histories are measured."
-- Isis Journal