Computer History

Thomas Jefferson praised Tom Paine as the greatest political writer of the age. The author of Common Sense and Rights of Man, Paine helped make revolutions in America and France. But beyond his inspiring calls to action, Paine harbored a deeper political vision for his adopted country. It was embodied in an architectural project that he spent decades planning: an iron bridge to span the Schuylkill River at Philadelphia.

In Empowered, Forrester’s Josh Bernoff - coauthor of the pioneering book Groundswell - and Ted Schadler explain how to transform your company by unleashing the force of HEROes: highly empowered and resourceful operatives. Your company needs them because, in the age of twitter, iPhones, Facebook, YouTube, your customers now step up to the counter armed with more data and access than ever before - often overmatching your team.

The Big Ratchet is the story of the ratchets: the technologies and innovations, big and small, that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket. Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. The Big Ratchet is the story of how it happened.

Big Tech Tyrants boast riches beyond emperors of old but act like juveniles who don't want to grow up. They are modern-day robber barons. Big Tech Tyrants don't know the meaning of privacy, when it comes to you. They try to make you believe they will give their products away for free as a service to society, when really, they are vacuuming your personal data. They use this data to discover your deepest secrets. Big Tech Tyrants is an eye-opening, must-listen book for anyone living in the 21st century.

Silicon Valley is imperializing the planet. With nearly bottomless supplies of cash and ambition, a small group of companies have been gradually seizing symbolic and practical civic leadership in America and worldwide. But Silicon Valley does not answer to the electorate; nor have they been voted into office. And the perils of their influence are only now making themselves known.

The cell phone changed the world. It revolutionized how people communicate, freed them to get in touch with one another at any time, in any place, without the constraints of the wired network. The cell phone led to the creation and growth of new industries. Yet the true story of its creation has not been told. This book tells that story. It centers on a battle for control of how people communicate, involving government regulators, lobbyists, police, technology breakthroughs, failures, quartz, and a horse. At the center of that story was Martin Cooper.

In this provocative book, Ramesh Srinivasan describes the internet as both an enabler of frictionless efficiency and a dirty tangle of politics, economics, and other inefficient, inharmonious human activities. We may love the immediacy of Google search results, the convenience of Amazon, and the elegance of our Apple devices, but it’s a one-way, top-down process. We’re not asked for our input or our opinions - only for our data. The internet is brought to us by wealthy technologists in Silicon Valley and China. Srinivasan argues that we must think in terms beyond the Valley.

Nikola Tesla was a bundle of contradictions - a consummate showman and a private recluse; a man of science addicted to self-promotion; a prolific inventor of technologies that made other people’s fortunes. Tesla made giant leaps in the technology of electrical supply, X-rays, radio remote control, and wireless electrical transmission. He embodied the aspirations and the contradictions of an age of innovation that seemed to have the future firmly in its grasp. Then as now, he attracted cranks and visionaries in equal number.

For the past 20+ years, everyone has been waiting for the story to be told. What really happened at Apple when Jobs returned and Gassee was out? In this first-ever comprehensive memoir, Gassee doesn’t hold anything back. From his stellar career to his deepest moments of doubt to his new calling as a grandfather, Gassee dispenses his legendarily witty advice and shares some very important moments of the tech world.

On a moonless night in January 1991, a dozen US aircraft appeared in the skies over Baghdad. To the Iraqi air defenses, the planes seemed to come from nowhere. Each aircraft was more than 60 feet in length and with a wingspan of 40 feet, yet its radar footprint was the size of a ball bearing. Here was the first extensive combat application of Stealth technology. And it was devastating.

Do you want to learn about business intelligence but don't feel like reading a boring textbook? In the modern business world, the pace of action continues to quicken. Businesses need to be able to get actionable insights from their data in order to make the right decisions to act rapidly and effectively. In this audiobook, you will be introduced to the concept of business intelligence.

Social media on the internet can be a nightmarish place. A primary shield against hateful language, violent videos, and online cruelty uploaded by users is not an algorithm. It is people. Mostly invisible by design, more than 100,000 commercial content moderators evaluate posts on mainstream social media platforms: enforcing internal policies, training artificial intelligence systems, and actively screening and removing offensive material. Roberts, an award-winning social media scholar, offers the first extensive ethnographic study of the commercial content moderation industry.

In a world of endless distraction, we have given away two of our most valuable assets: time and attention. Technology has given us the incredible gift of access to an ever-increasing amount of information and has opened the door to a vast array of choices and opportunities. However, having more options doesn’t correlate to an increase in our success. Research shows that having more to choose from causes anxiety and decreases our likelihood of taking action.

When Sleepers, Wake! was released in Australia, it immediately became influential around the world. Now its author, the polymath and former politician Barry Jones, turns his attention to what has happened since - especially to politics, health, and our climate in the digital age - and to the challenges faced by increasingly fragile democracies and public institutions.

This entertaining account, offering a plethora of little known facts and insights from previously classified military projects, shows how the real-world science of the Cold War followed in the footsteps of SF - and how the two together changed our perception of both science and scientists, and paved the way to the world we live in today.

A father cleans up after his toddler and imagines a cup that won't spill. An engineer watches people using walkie-talkies and has an idea. A doctor figures out how to deliver patients to the operating room before they die. By studying inventions like these—the sippy cup, the cell phone, and an ingenious hospital bed—we can learn how people imagine their way around "impossible" problems to discover groundbreaking answers. Pagan Kennedy reports on how these enduring methods can be adapted to the twenty-first century.

Ambassadors from Earth relates the story of the first unmanned space probes and planetary explorers - from the Sputnik and Explorer satellites launched in the late 1950's to the thrilling interstellar Voyager missions of the '70's - that yielded some of the most celebrated successes and spectacular failures of the space age. Jay Gallentine delivers a quirky and unforgettable look at the lives and legacy of the Americans and Soviets who conceived, built, and guided those unmanned missions to the planets and beyond.

In Rust journalist Jonathan Waldman travels from Key West, Florida, to Prudhoe Bay, Alaska, to meet the colorful and often reclusive people concerned with corrosion. He sneaks into an abandoned steelworks with a brave artist and nearly gets kicked out of Can School. Across the Arctic he follows a massive high-tech robot, hunting for rust in the Alaska pipeline.

In Out of Touch, Professor of Psychology Michelle Drouin investigates what she calls our intimacy famine, exploring love, belongingness, and fulfillment and considering why relationships carried out on technological platforms may leave us starving for physical connection. Drouin puts it this way: when most of our interactions are through social media, we are taking tiny hits of dopamine rather than the huge shots of oxytocin that an intimate in-person relationship would provide.

In early 2020 on a writing sabbatical, Michael Bociurkiw was on Spain’s frontier with Gibraltar when his phone started receiving texts from Asia about a mysterious disease sickening hundreds of people in China’s Hubei province. Little did he know at the time that it would quickly morph into the deadliest pandemic in modern history.