Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book

Title Exploring the early digital / Thomas Haigh, editor
Published Cham, Switzerland : Springer, [2019]

Copies

Description 1 online resource
Series History of Computing, 2190-6831
History of computing (London, England)
Contents Introducing the early digital / Thomas Haigh -- Inventing an analog past and a digital future in computing / Ronald R. Kline -- Forgotten machines : the need for a new master narrative / Doron Swade -- Calvin Mooers, zatocoding, and early research on information retrieval / Paul E. Ceruzzi -- Switching the engineer's mind-set to Boolean : applying Shannon's algebra to control circuits and digital computing (1938-1958) / Maarten Bullynck -- The ENIAC display : insignia of a digital praxeology / Tristan Thielmann -- The evolution of digital computing practice on the Cambridge University EDSAC, 1949-1951 / Martin Campbell-Kelly -- The media of programming / Mark Priestley and Thomas Haigh -- Foregrounding the background : business, economics, labor, and government policy as shaping forces in early digital computing history / William Aspray and Christopher Loughnane -- "The man with a micro-calculator" : digital modernity and late Soviet computing practices / Ksenia Tatarchenko
Summary 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. -- Provided by publisher
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on May 09, 2019)
Subject Computer systems -- History -- Congresses
Computers -- Congresses
COMPUTERS -- Computer Literacy.
COMPUTERS -- Computer Science.
COMPUTERS -- Data Processing.
COMPUTERS -- Hardware -- General.
COMPUTERS -- Information Technology.
COMPUTERS -- Machine Theory.
COMPUTERS -- Reference.
Computer systems
Computers
Genre/Form proceedings (reports)
Conference papers and proceedings
History
Conference papers and proceedings.
Actes de congrès.
Form Electronic book
Author Haigh, Thomas, 1972- editor.
ISBN 9783030021528
3030021521
9783030021535
303002153X