Computing

The history of computing could be told as the story of hardware and software, or thestory of the Internet, or the story of "smart" hand-held devices, with subplots involvingIBM, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, and Twitter. In this concise and accessible account of theinvention and development of digital technology, computer historian Paul Ceruzzi offers a broaderand more useful perspective. He identifies four major threads that run throughout all of computing'stechnological development: digitization--the coding of information, computation, and control inbinary form, ones and zeros; the convergence of multiple streams of techniques, devices, andmachines, yielding more than the sum of their parts; the steady advance of electronic technology, ascharacterized famously by "Moore's Law"; and the human-machine interface. Ceruzzi guidesus 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-aircraftdevices), and recounting the development of the punch card (for use in the 1890 U.S. Census). Hedescribes the ENIAC, built for scientific and military applications; the UNIVAC, the first generalpurpose computer; and ARPANET, the Internet's precursor. Ceruzzi's account traces the world-changingevolution of the computer from a room-size ensemble of machinery to a "minicomputer" to adesktop 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 visitsthat hotbed of innovation, Silicon Valley, and brings the story up to the present with the Internet,the World Wide Web, and social networking.

Paul E. Ceruzzi is a Curator at the National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. He is the author of A History of Modern Computing, Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945-2005, both published by the MIT Press, and other books.