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In this book the author re-creates the scenes of focused experimentation, incredible mathematical insight, and pure creative genius that gave us computers, digital television, modern genetics, models of stellar evolution, in other words, computer code. In the 1940s and '50s, a group of eccentric geniuses, led by John von Neumann, gathered at the newly created Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. Their joint project was the realization...

"On April 1, 1976, two scruffy twentysomethings, both named Steve, founded a startup. Their goal: To bring the revolutionary power of computers to everyone. Over the next five decades, Apple reshaped the technology and cultural landscapes, introducing the public to breakthroughs like the mouse, laser printing, CD-ROM, WiFi, digital video, home networking, touchscreen phones, and tablets. Jobs’s obsessive eye for detail set the stage for products—Mac,...

Surveys digital technology from the early days of computers to virtual reality and the World Wide Web, describing the uses of computer simulation in flight, battle, hazardous environments, and entertainment.

Meet Victorian London's most dynamic duo: Charles Babbage, the unrealized inventor of the computer, and his accomplice, Ada, Countess of Lovelace, the peculiar protoprogrammer and daughter of Lord Byron. When Lovelace translated a description of Babbage's plans for an enormous mechanical calculating machine in 1842, she added annotations three times longer than the original work. Her footnotes contained the first appearance of the general computing...

"A fascinating look at Ada Lovelace, the pioneering computer programmer and the daughter of the poet Lord Byron" -- Provided by publisher.

One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois-Iowa border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical calculations in his lab, hit on the idea that the binary number system and electronic switches, combined with an array of capacitors on a moving drum to serve as memory, could yield a computing machine that would make his life easier. Then he went back and...

Traces the life and work of the man whose nineteenth century inventions led to the development of the computer.