I calculator Howard Aiken strongly urged the National Bureau of Standards not to support the development of commercial computers. He famously, and myopically, predicted that there would never be a need for more than five or six computers in the United States. Five decades later, Aiken's prophecy seems ridiculous.
Computers are ubiquitous.
They are woven into the daily fabrics of life, from education to health care. Surprisingly, however, the story of computing has largely been explored and explained only by journalists and computer scientists. Despite the proximity of change and the platitude that historians study those dimensions of the past most relevant to their own times, professional historians have devoted little attention to the development of computing. Paul E. Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing signals the end of this neglect. Ceruzzi is a curator for the National Air and Space Museum, and his History of Modern Computing is an ambitious attempt to relate the history of computing from 1945 to 1995.