Computer Science History

Award-winning author William Rosen tells the story of the men responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the machine that drove it: the steam engine.

Those of you living through the next 30 years will become the most powerful creatures that have ever existed. You will have the opportunity and the duty to create a decidedly better world. Experience and maturity alone cannot provide the required wisdom fast enough. You will need to maximize your innate potential to accelerate wisdom. The Potentialist: Your Future in the New Reality of the Next Thirty Years explains the first steps to achieve your potential and accelerate wisdom. You will discover how forces of change create a New Reality by breaking down the one we know.

Our world today - from the phone in your pocket to the car that you drive, the allure of social media to the strategy of the Pentagon - has been shaped irrevocably by the technology of silicon transistors. Year after year, for half a century, these tiny switches have enabled ever-more startling capabilities. Their incredible proliferation has altered the course of human history as dramatically as any political or social revolution. At the heart of it all has been one quiet Californian: Gordon Moore.

In this riveting account of an area of Appalachia known as the Quiet Zone where cell phones and Wi-Fi are banned, journalist Stephen Kurczy explores the pervasive role of technology in our lives and the innate human need for quiet.

When Pete Etchells was 13, his father died from motor neurone disease. In order to cope, he immersed himself in a virtual world - first as an escape, but later to try to understand what had happened. Etchells is now a researcher into the psychological effects of video games, and was co-author on a recent paper explaining why WHO plans to classify "game addiction" as a danger to public health are based on bad science and (he thinks) are a bad idea. In this, his first book, he journeys through the history and development of video games via scientific study....

Humanity's first reusable spacecraft and the most complex machine ever built, NASA's space shuttle debuted with great promise and as a dependable source of wonder and national pride. But with the Challenger catastrophe in 1986, the whole space shuttle program came into question, as did NASA itself, so long an institution that was seemingly above reproach. Wheels Stop tells the stirring story of how, after the Challenger disaster, the space shuttle not only recovered but went on to perform its greatest missions.

In December 2009, Google began customizing its search results for each user. Instead of giving you the most broadly popular result, Google now tries to predict what you are most likely to click on. According to MoveOn.org board president Eli Pariser, Google's change in policy is symptomatic of the most significant shift to take place on the Web in recent years: the rise of personalization.

Leading innovation expert Alec Ross explains what's next for the world, mapping out the advances and stumbling blocks that will emerge in the next 10 years - for businesses, governments, and the global community - and how we can navigate them.

In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the Internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project. With deep research, skilled storytelling, and provocative arguments, Surveillance Valley will change the way you think about the news - and the device on which you read it.

A big source of tension between the US and China at the moment is technology. And one very small component is now at the centre of this battle for global dominance: the microchip. Controlling chip manufacturing in the 21st century may well prove to be like controlling the oil supply in the 20th. The country that controls this manufacturing can throttle the military and economic power of others. At the heart of this battle is ARM Holdings. The Everything Blueprint describes the titanic power struggle for control of the microchip.

Paul Kennedy, award-winning author of The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers and one of today’s most renowned historians, now provides a new and unique look at how World War II was won. Engineers of Victory is a fascinating nuts-and-bolts account of the strategic factors that led to Allied victory. Kennedy reveals how the leaders’ grand strategy was carried out by the ordinary soldiers, scientists, engineers, and businessmen responsible for realizing their commanders’ visions of success.

Optimization is the driving principle of our modern world. We now can manufacture, transport, and organize things more cheaply and faster than ever. Optimized models underlie everything from airline schedules to dating site matches. We strive for efficiency in our daily lives, obsessed with productivity and optimal performance. How did a mathematical concept take on such outsize cultural shape? And what is lost when efficiency is gained? Optimal Illusions traces the fascinating history of optimization from its roots in America’s founding principles to its modern manifestations.

Jaron Lanier, a Silicon Valley visionary since the 1980s, was among the first to predict the revolutionary changes the World Wide Web would bring to commerce and culture. Now, in his first book, written more than two decades after the web was created, Lanier offers this provocative and cautionary look at the way it is transforming our lives for better and for worse.

Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom explores the reach, penetration, power, and impact of Big Digital or the mega-information managers, social media platforms, Artificial Intelligence developers, providers of other web applications and functionalities, and the architects and proponents of the promised Internet of Things.

Most of our everyday life experiences are multisensory in nature. In recent years, many of these experiences have been increasingly transformed, and capitalized on through advancements that adapt the world around us, and to suit our ever-more computerized environment. Multisensory Experiences is a comprehensive introduction that takes the listener from the fundamentals of multisensory experiences and design, through the relationship between the senses and technology, to finally what the future of those experiences may look like, and our responsibility in it.

A self-professed "comprehensive anticipatory design scientist", the inventor Buckminster Fuller (1895-1983) was undoubtedly a visionary. Fuller's creations often bordered on the realm of science fiction, ranging from the freestanding geodesic dome to the three-wheel Dymaxion car to a bathroom requiring neither plumbing nor sewage. Yet in spite of his brilliant mind and lifelong devotion to serving mankind, Fuller's expansive ideas were often dismissed, and have faded from public memory since his death.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Rocket Men and the award-winning biographer of Thomas Paine comes the first complete history of the Atomic Age, a brilliant, magisterial account of the men and women who uncovered the secrets of the nucleus, brought its power to America, and ignited the 20th century.

From the New York Times best-selling author of How We Got to Now and Extra Life, a look at the world-changing innovations we made while keeping ourselves entertained. This history of popular entertainment takes a long-zoom approach, contending that the pursuit of novelty and wonder is a powerful driver of world-shaping technological change. Steven Johnson argues that, throughout history, the cutting edge of innovation lies wherever people are working the hardest to keep themselves and others amused.

Unsupervised examines the fast-emerging technologies and tools that are already starting to completely revolutionize our world. Beyond that, the book takes an in-depth look at how we have arrived at this dizzying point in our history, who holds the reins of these formidable technologies, mostly without any supervision. It explains why we as business leaders, entrepreneurs, academics, educators, lawmakers, investors or users and all responsible citizens must act now to influence and help oversee the future of a technological world.

Starting with hands, abacus, and slide rule, humans have always reached for tools to simplify math. Pocket-sized calculators ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, took us to the bottom of the ocean, and accompanied us to the moon. The pocket calculator changed our world, until it was supplanted by more modern devices that, in a cruel twist of irony, it helped to create. Keith Houston transports listeners from the nascent economies of the ancient world to World War II, and into the technological arms race that led to the first affordable electronic pocket calculators.