Computer Science History

July 1967: At the Moscow Air Show, the Soviets unveiled six new state-of-the-art aircraft. From among this lineup of new fighters and interceptors stood the Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-25 - purportedly capable of outrunning and outmaneuvering any aircraft in NATO’s inventory. Yet even before its public appearance in Moscow, the MiG-25 had been a grave concern for Western analysts.

The dream of capturing and organizing knowledge is as old as history. From the archives of ancient Sumeria and the Library of Alexandria to the Library of Congress and Wikipedia, humanity has wrestled with the problem of harnessing its intellectual output. The timeless quest for wisdom has been as much about information storage and retrieval as creative genius. In Cataloging the World, Alex Wright introduces us to a figure who stands out in the long line of thinkers and idealists who devoted themselves to the task.

You are a four-dimensional human. Each of us exists in three-dimensional physical space. But as a constellation of everyday digital phenomena rewires our lives, we are increasingly coaxed from the containment of our predigital selves into a wonderful and eerie fourth dimension, a world of ceaseless communication, instant information, and global connection.

For decades, technology encouraged people to squander their time and intellect as passive consumers. Today, technology has finally caught up with human potential. In Cognitive Surplus, Internet guru Clay Shirky forecasts the thrilling changes we will all enjoy as new digital technology puts our untapped resources of talent and goodwill to use at last.

In Overcomplicated, complexity scientist Samuel Arbesman offers a fresh, insightful field guide to living with complex technologies that defy human comprehension. As technology grows more complex, Arbesman argues, its behavior mimics the vagaries of the natural world more than it conforms to a mathematical model. If we are to survive and thrive in this new age, we must abandon our need for governing principles and rules and accept the chaos.

In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues that the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message. Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman describes how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and how they have interpreted those times' meanings. And in a rebuttal to the demand for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can come to those who wait.

The United States military currently views cyberspace as the "fifth domain" of warfare - alongside land, sea, air, and space - and the Department of Defense, National Security Agency, and CIA all field teams of hackers who can - and do - launch computer virus strikes against enemy targets. In fact, as @War shows, US hackers were crucial to our victory in Iraq.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto.

Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new audiobook, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code?

Crystal Fire is a tale of the human factors in technology; the pride and jealousies coupled with scientific and economic aspiration that led to the creation of modern microelectronics and ignited the greatest technological explosion in history.

AIs are everywhere, and they're changing everything. AI Explained: Facts, Fiction, and Future from best-selling author Nigel Poulton is your fast-track easy-to-understand guide to the exciting new world of Artificial Intelligence (AI).

In a race against time, the Apollo program challenged our scientific capabilities and redefined the boundaries of humanity. To celebrate NASA’s 60 years of exploration, Seeker went back in time to relive each Apollo mission. Listen along as Seeker dives into the whole story from its WWII origins to its present day possibilities available for the first time in audio.

Cohen shows how smart guys like Jeff Bezos, Peter Thiel, and Mark Zuckerberg fell in love with a radically individualistic ideal and then mainstreamed it. With these very rich men leading the way, unions, libraries, public schools, common courtesy, and even government itself have been pushed aside to make way for supposedly efficient market-based encounters via the Internet. Donald Trump's election victory was an inadvertent triumph of the "disruption" that Silicon Valley has been pushing. A society that belittles civility, empathy, and collaboration can easily be led astray.

Questo libro sulla storia dei videogiochi non ha alcuna pretesa di raccontare ogni avvenimento del medium che in pochissimo tempo diventato il più ricco, diffuso, criticato, influenzato e culturalmente rilevante. E tuttavia passa in rassegna le tappe fondamentali del percorso che ha portato quel sistema di intrattenimento a diventare una parte fondamentale della nostra attuale cultura. Si parla di tecnologia e famiglia, di storia universale e personale, di scoperte continue, curiosità, notti insonni.

Ninguna empresa científica reciente ha resultado tan seductora, aterradora y llena de extravagantes promesas y frustrantes reveses como la IA. La galardonada científica informática Melanie Mitchell revela su turbulenta historia, la reciente oleada de aparentes éxitos, las grandes esperanzas y temores que la rodean, y las cuestiones más urgentes hoy: ¿hasta qué punto son realmente inteligentes los programas de IA? ¿Qué pueden hacer realmente? ¿Hasta qué punto esperamos que se asemejen a los humanos y cuándo debemos preocuparnos de que nos superen?

When Alia Dastagir published a story for USA Today as part of an investigation into child sexual abuse, she became the tar­get of an online mob launched by QAnon and encouraged by Donald Trump, Jr. While female journalists, politicians, academ­ics, and influencers receive a disproportionate amount of online attacks because of the nature of their professions, all women online experience hate, creating profound harms for individual women and society.

Artificial Intelligence has been “just around the corner” for decades, continually disappointing those who long believed in its potential. But now, with the emergence and growing use of ChatGPT, Gemini, and a rapidly multiplying number of other AI tools, many are wondering: Has AI’s moment finally arrived? In AI Valley, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Gary Rivlin brings us deep into the world of AI development in Silicon Valley. Over the course of more than a year, Rivlin closely follows founders and venture capitalists trying to capitalize on this AI moment.

In this disquieting cyber thriller, Joseph Menn takes readers into the murky hacker underground, traveling the globe from San Francisco to Costa Rica and London to Russia. His guides are California surfer and computer whiz Barrett Lyon and a fearless British high-tech agent. Through these heroes, Menn shows the evolution of cyber-crime from small-time thieving to sophisticated, organized gangs, who began by attacking corporate websites but increasingly steal financial data from consumers.

Von der Sonnenuhr zum Fischer-Dübel: Die Welt der Technik in 100 Objekten. Von einem Cembalo aus dem Venedig des 16. Jahrhunderts über den Benz-Patent-Motorwagen Nr. 1 und die Aufnahme Röntgens von der Hand seiner Frau bis zu einer Recyclingtasche und dem mRNA-Impfstoff gegen COVID-19 von BioNTech – jedes dieser 100 Objekte erzählt seine Geschichte auf mehreren Ebenen.

Eine Chinesin, die es wagt, ihren brasilianischen Freund nicht mehr länger nur in einer virussicheren, virtuellen Realität zu treffen. Ein junger Mann in Sri Lanka, der mittels autonomer Fahrzeuge Leben rettet. Ein Münchner Quantencomputerprofi, der die Welt mit KI-gesteuerten Waffen ins Chaos stürzen will... In KI 2041 haben sich der international bekannteste KI-Experte und ein führender Science-Fiction-Autor zusammengetan, um eine zwingende Frage zu beantworten: Wie wird künstliche Intelligenz unser Leben in zwanzig Jahren verändert haben?