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Computer: A History of the Information Machine

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Computer: A History of the Information Machine
AuthorMartin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray
LanguageEnglish
GenreComputer science
PublisherBasic Books/HarperCollins
Publication date
1996; 2nd ed. 2004
Publication placeUnited States
ISBN0-465-02989-2
OCLC59659328
004/.09 20
LC ClassQA76.17 .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, with one chapter on computer software, which ends with the rise of the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. A slightly revised 2nd edition, described below, was published in 2004.[1]

Table of contents

  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • 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

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).


The revised second edition ends, somewhat ominously:

The Internet is simply too important for its continued existence to be imperiled by an antisocial and lawless minority. (2004:279)

Reviews

According to Michael Mahoney's 1998 review in 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."[2]

Corrections (for future editions)

  • uranium should be plutonium on pp. 69 and 79 (2nd edition) See entries for Manhattan_project#Weapon_design or Plutonium#Trinity_and_Fat_Man_atomic_bombs
  • WHERE is Alan Turing . . . Very thin and sketchy treatment of a giant of computer science
  • Seems like an unconscionable "hardware bias" to suggest Harvard Mark I had "nothing" resulting from it . . . Yet next paragraph mentions Grace Hopper, one of the clearly recognized founders of modern programming?
  • why is Digital Equipment Corporation not mentioned in the BUNCH of also rans . . . ?
  • what about post-1993 IBM . . . Seems rather odd to stress the FALL of IBM (chapter six) ??
  • and also *information* theorist Claude Shannon . . . not even in the index ?
  • with the huge interest in women in computing why so many old-fashioned treatments of women?
  • Ada Lovelace . . . The "recent scholarship" stated on (48) does not agree with Fuegi, J.; Francis, J. (2003). Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 'notes'. 25. pp. 18–26. doi:10.1109/MAHC.2003.1253887.
* why not include Elizabeth Jake Feinler as co-inventor of Internet DNS
* ok also Fran Allen Barbara Liskov . . . Big prize winners in computer science field
* Mary Mauchley not mentioned

References

  1. ^ World Cat entry
  2. ^ 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.
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