Dependable And Historic Computing

This Festschrift volume, published in honor of Brian Randell on the occasion of his 75th birthday, contains a total of 37 refereed contributions. Two biographical papers are followed by the six invited papers that were presented at the conference 'Dependable and Historic Computing: The Randell Tales', held during April 7-8, 2011 at Newcastle University, UK. The remaining contributions are authored by former scientific colleagues of Brian Randell. The papers focus on the core of Brian Randell’s work: the development of computing science and the study of its history. Moreover, his wider interests are reflected and so the collection comprises papers on software engineering, storage fragmentation, computer architecture, programming languages and dependability. There is even a paper that echoes Randell’s love of maps. After an early career with English Electric and then with IBM in New York and California, Brian Randell joined Newcastle University. His main research has been on dependable computing in all its forms, especially reliability, safety and security aspects, and he has led several major European collaborative projects.

History of Computing in the Twentieth Century

Tracing the story of computing from Babylonian counting boards to smartphones, this inspiring textbook provides a concise overview of the key events in the history of computing, together with discussion exercises to stimulate deeper investigation into this fascinating area. Features: provides chapter introductions, summaries, key topics, and review questions; includes an introduction to analogue and digital computers, and to the foundations of computing; examines the contributions of ancient civilisations to the field of computing; covers the first digital computers, and the earliest commercial computers, mainframes and minicomputers; describes the early development of the integrated circuit and the microprocessor; reviews the emergence of home computers; discusses the creation of the Internet, the invention of the smartphone, and the rise of social media; presents a short history of telecommunications, programming languages, operating systems, software engineering, artificial intelligence, and databases.

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.

This history of computing focuses not on chronology (what came first and who deserves credit for it) but on the actual architectures of the first machines that made electronic computing a practical reality. The book covers computers built in the United States, Germany, England, and Japan. It makes clear that similar concepts were often pursued simultaneously and that the early researchers explored many architectures beyond the von Neumann architecture that eventually became canonical. The contributors include not only historians but also engineers and computer pioneers. An introductory chapter describes the elements of computer architecture and explains why "being first" is even less interesting for computers than for other areas of technology. The essays contain a remarkable amount of new material, even on well-known machines, and several describe reconstructions of the historic machines. These investigations are of more than simply historical interest, for architectures designed to solve specific problems in the past may suggest new approaches to similar problems in today's machines. Contributors Titiimaea F. Ala'ilima, Lin Ping Ang, William Aspray, Friedrich L. Bauer, Andreas Brennecke, Chris P. Burton, Martin Campbell-Kelly, Paul Ceruzzi, I. Bernard Cohen, John Gustafson, Wilhelm Hopmann, Harry D. Huskey, Friedrich W. Kistermann, Thomas Lange, Michael S. Mahoney, R. B. E. Napper, Seiichi Okoma, Hartmut Petzold, Raúl Rojas, Anthony E. Sale, Robert W. Seidel, Ambros P. Speiser, Frank H. Sumner, James F. Tau, Jan Van der Spiegel, Eiiti Wada, Michael R. Williams

Robert Irwin travels back in time with his real-life best friend, in his third wild adventure Robert and his best friend Riley are visiting the Canadian badlands in Alberta with Riley's Uncle Nate. The badlands are home to more than 35 different species of dinosaur fossils. Robert and Riley get pulled back in time to Alberta, Canada during the Late Cretaceous period, to find a heavily armored euoplocephalus trapped in vines. The rescue doesn't go according to plan when a ferocious gorgosaurus arrives on the scene, looking for a snack.

Changes in the present challenge us to reinterpret the past, but historians have not yet come to grips with the convergence of computing, media, and communications technology. Today these things are inextricably intertwined, in technologies such as the smartphone and internet, in convergent industries, and in social practices. Yet they remain three distinct historical subfields, tilled by different groups of scholars using different tools. We often call this conglomeration “the digital,” recognizing its deep connection to the technology of digital computing. Unfortunately, interdisciplinary studies of digital practices, digital methods, or digital humanities have rarely been informed by deep engagement with the history of computing.Contributors to this volume have come together to reexamine an apparently familiar era in the history of computing through new lenses, exploring early digital computing and engineering practice as digital phenomena rather than as engines of mathematics and logic. Most focus on the period 1945 to 1960, the era in which the first electronic digital computers were created and the computer industry began to develop. Because digitality is first and foremost a way of reading objects and encoding information within them, we are foregrounding topics that have until now been viewed as peripheral in the history of computing: betting odds calculators, card file systems, program and data storage, programmable calculators, and digital circuit design practices. Reconceptualizing the “history of computing” as study of the “early digital” decenters the stored program computer, repositioning it as one of many digital technologies.

From the first digital computer to the dot-com crash—a story of individuals, institutions, and the forces that led to a series of dramatic transformations. This engaging history covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the dot-com crash. The author concentrates on five key moments of transition: the transformation of the computer in the late 1940s from a specialized scientific instrument to a commercial product; the emergence of small systems in the late 1960s; the beginning of personal computing in the 1970s; the spread of networking after 1985; and, in a chapter written for this edition, the period 1995-2001. The new material focuses on the Microsoft antitrust suit, the rise and fall of the dot-coms, and the advent of open source software, particularly Linux. Within the chronological narrative, the book traces several overlapping threads: the evolution of the computer's internal design; the effect of economic trends and the Cold War; the long-term role of IBM as a player and as a target for upstart entrepreneurs; the growth of software from a hidden element to a major character in the story of computing; and the recurring issue of the place of information and computing in a democratic society. The focus is on the United States (though Europe and Japan enter the story at crucial points), on computing per se rather than on applications such as artificial intelligence, and on systems that were sold commercially and installed in quantities.