Computing: A Concise History Audiobook
Computing: A Concise History Audiobook
- Tim Andres Pabon
- Gildan Media
- 2015-11-01
- 3 h 56 min
Summary:
The annals of computing could be told as the storyplot of hardware and software, or the story of the web, or the story of ‘sensible’ hand-held devices, with subplots involving IBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. Within this concise and accessible account from the invention and development of digital technology, pc historian Paul Ceruzzi gives a broader and more useful perspective. He identifies four main threads that operate throughout most of computing’s technical advancement: about Processing: A Concise History digitization–the coding of info, computation, and control in binary form, types and zeros; the convergence of multiple streams of techniques, gadgets, and machines, yielding a lot more than the sum of their parts; the regular advance of digital technology, as characterized famously by ‘Moore’s Legislation’; and the human-machine user interface. Ceruzzi guides us through computing history, telling what sort of Bell Labs mathematician coined the word ‘digital’ in 1942 (to spell it out a high-speed approach to calculating used in anti-aircraft products), and recounting the development of the punch card (for use in the 1890 U.S. Census). He explains the ENIAC, constructed for medical and armed forces applications; the UNIVAC, the first general purpose pc; and ARPANET, the Internet’s precursor. Ceruzzi’s account traces the world-changing development of the pc from a room-size ensemble of machinery to a ‘minicomputer’ to a pc to a pocket-sized smart phone. He describes the development of the silicon chip, that could store ever-increasing amounts of data and enabled ever-decreasing device size. He trips that hotbed of technology, Silicon Valley, and brings the story up to the present with the Internet, the internet, and social media.