num_pages: 216
description: The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software or the story of the Internet or the story of smart hand-held devices with subplots involving IBM Microsoft Apple Facebook and Twitter. In this concise and accessible account of the invention and development of digital technology computer historian Paul Ceruzzi offers a broader and more useful perspective. He identifies four major threads that run throughout all of computing's technological development: digitization--the coding of information computation and control in binary form ones and zeros; the convergence of multiple streams of techniques devices and machines yielding more than the sum of their parts; the steady advance of electronic technology as characterized famously by Moore's Law; and the human-machine interface. Ceruzzi guides us through computing history telling how a Bell Labs mathematician coined the word digital in 1942 (to describe a high-speed method of calculating used in anti-aircraft devices) and recounting the development of the punch card (for use in the 1890 U.S. Census). He describes the ENIAC built for scientific and military applications; the UNIVAC the first general purpose computer; and ARPANET the Internet's precursor. Ceruzzi's account traces the world-changing evolution of the computer from a room-size ensemble of machinery to a minicomputer to a desktop computer to a pocket-sized smart phone. He describes the development of the silicon chip which could store ever-increasing amounts of data and enabled ever-decreasing device size. He visits that hotbed of innovation Silicon Valley and brings the story up to the present with the Internet the World Wide Web and social networking.
language: English
title: Computing: A Concise History
publisher: The MIT Press