Bibliography for  HISTORY OF COMPUTING  updated 24 March 2009

Thomas J. Misa Charles Babbage Institute University of Minnesota Minneapolis MN 55455

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.  (journal)

ON-LINE INDEX at <ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?puNumber=85>
"Computing Then" -- Annals content on-line

Charles Babbage Institute (at University of Minnesota) -- research center for computer history:

• list of computer-history WWW sites [CBI's Wikipedia article]
• archival collections in computer history, including on-line finding guides and keyword search engine;
  
• oral-history database (400 on-line interviews accessible with search engine)
• CBI Hosted Publications on-line research and reference materials
• 2500-item Software History Bibliography
• History, Gender, and Computing (30-31 May 2008 conference)
• Who was Charles Babbage?

Computer History Museum -- "the world's largest history museum for preserving and presenting the computing revolution and its impact on the human experience"

Heinz Nixdorf MuseumsForum -- "not only the world's largest computer museum but also a modern conference centre"

IEEE History Center -- historical exhibits on electrical engineering

Internet Society "Histories of the Internet"

J.A.N. Lee's history of computing (at Virginia Tech) -- many files

Smithsonian's computer history collection

Ed Thalen's extensive list of on-line historical documents <www.ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/on-line-docs.html>
 

Surveys and Historiography

Agar, Jon. The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer.  MIT Press, 2003)

Aspray, William. "The History of Computing within the History of Information Technology," History and Technology 11 (1994): 7-19.

Aspray, William. "Leadership in Computing History: Arthur Norberg and the Charles Babbage Institute." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29 #4 (Oct.-Dec. 2007): 16-26. <UMN>

Braun, Ernest, and Stuart Macdonald.  1982.  Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics.  Cambridge University Press; 2nd ed.

Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and William Aspray.  1996.  Computer: A History of the Information Machine.  New York: Basic Books.

Campbell-Kelly, Martin. "The History of the History of Software."  IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29 #4 (Oct.-Dec. 2007): 40-51. <UMN>

Ceruzzi, Paul E.  A History of Modern Computing. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998; second edition 2003.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr.  Inventing the Electronic Century: The Epic Story of the Consumer Electronics and Computer Science Industries.  New York: Free Press, 2001.

Chandler, Alfred D., Jr., and James W. Cortada (eds.). A Nation Transformed by Information: How Information Has Shaped the United States from Colonial Times to the Present.  Oxford University Press, 2000.

Cortada, James W. The Digital Hand.  Volume 1: How Computers Changed the Work of American Manufacturing, Transportation, and Retail Industries; Volume 2: How Computers Changed the Work of American Financial, Telecommunications, Media, and Entertainment Industries; Volume 3: How Computers Changed the Work of American Public Sector Industries. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004-8.

Edwards, Paul. "Making History" <www.si.umich.edu/~pne/PDF/makinghistory.pdf>

Edwards, Paul. "From 'Impact' to Social Process: Computers in Society and Culture" (1994)  <www.si.umich.edu/~pne/PDF/impact.pdf>

Hashagen, Ulf, Reinhard Keil-Slawik, and Arthur L. Norberg, eds. History of Computing: Software Issues. Berlin/New York: Springer, 2002

Headrick, Daniel R.  When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850.  Oxford University Press, 2002.

IEEE Annals of the History of Computing.  (journal)

Online Index at <ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/RecentIssue.jsp?puNumber=85>

Mahoney, Michael S. "The History of Computing in the History of Technology." Annals of the History of Computing 10 #2 (1988): 113-125. <online> <UMN>

Mahoney, Michael S. "Finding a History for Software Engineering." Annals of the History of Computing 26 #1 (2004): 8-19. <online> <UMN>

Mahoney, Michael S. "The Histories of Computing(s)." Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 30 #2 (June 2005). <online>

Misa, Thomas J. "Understanding 'How Computing has Changed the World'." Annals of the History of Computing 29 #4 (2007): 52-63. <UMN>

Shurkin, Joel N.  1996.  Engines of the Mind: The Evolution of The Computer from Mainframes to Microprocessors.  New York: Norton.

"The Machine That Changed the World" <waxy.org/2008/06/the_machine_that_changed_the_world/>

Yost, Jeffrey R. The Computer Industry (Emerging Industries in the United States).  Greenwood, 2005.  Amazon.

Babbage and the Mechanical Vision (1830s-1930s)

Babbage, Charles (1791-1871).  Charles Babbage and his calculating engines; selected writings by Charles Babbage and others.  Edited with an introduction by Philip Morrison and Emily Morrison.  New York, Dover Publications, 1961

Babbage, Charles (1791-1871).  On the economy of machinery and manufactures. [1835]  New York, A. M. Kelley, 1963.

Bromley, Allan G. "Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, 1838" IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 4 #3 (1982); reprinted AHC 20 #4 (1998): 29-45. <UMN>

Cortada, James W.  1993.  Before the Computer: IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the Industry They Created, 1865-1956.  Princeton University Press.

Fuegi, John, and Jo Francis, "Lovelace & Babbage and the creation of the 1843 'notes'." Annals of the History of Computing 25 #4 (Oct-Dec 2003): 18-26. <Digital Object Identifier> <UMN>

Goldstine, Herman H.  The computer from Pascal to von Neumann.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980, c1972.

Grier, David Alan. When Computers Were Human. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005

Hyman, Anthony.  Charles Babbage, pioneer of the computer.  Oxford: Oxford University Press; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982.

Hyman, Anthony (ed.) and H. W. (Harry Wilmot) Buxton. 1988.  Memoir of the life and labours of the late Charles Babbage Esq., F.R.S.  Cambridge: MIT Press; Los Angeles: Tomash, 1988

Jones, Douglas W. "Punched Cards"  <www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/cards/> (Oct. 2003) [illustrated technical history; links to emulators; rentals; resources, e.g.: ]

Steve Lubar's "Do not fold, spindle or mutilate": A cultural history of the punch card"

Charles M. Province's "IBM Punch Card Systems in the U.S. Army"

Sites illustrating Jacquard loom, and Herman Hollerith)

Maney, Kevin. The Maverick and His Machine: Thomas Watson, Sr. and the Making of IBM.   John Wiley & Sons, 2003.

Pugh, Emerson W.  Building IBM: shaping an industry and its technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Stein, Dorothy.  Ada: A Life and a Legacy.  Cambridge: MIT Press, c1985. [Lovelace, Ada King, 1815-1852.]

Swade, Doron.  The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the quest to build the first computer.  London: Little, Brown, 2000.

Swade, Doron.  "The construction of Charles Babbage's Difference Engine No. 2." Annals of the History of Computing 27 #3 (2005): 70-88. <UMN>

Wilmot-Buxton, H. J. (1843-1911). Memoir of the life and labours of the late Charles Babbage Esq., F.R.S.  Cambridge: MIT Press/Los Angeles: Tomash, 1988.

Yates, JoAnne.  Control through Communication: The Rise of System in American Management (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989)

The Analog Era (1920-50s) [see also Science & Systems]

Bennett, S.  1993.  A History of Control Engineering 1930-1955.  Peter Peregrinus.

Bowles, M. "Theory and Practice: Obstacles and Opportunities in the Development of the British and American Differential Analyzers." Annals of the History of Computing 18 #4 (1996). <UMN>

Clymer, A.B.  "The mechanical analog computers of Hannibal Ford and William Newell." Annals of the History of Computing 15 #2 (1993): 19-34. <UMN>

Holst, Per A. "George A. Philbrick and Polyphemus: The First Electronic Training Simulator." Annals of the History of Computing 4 #2 (1982): 143-156. <UMN>

Johansson, M.  "Early analog computers in Sweden." Annals of the History of Computing 18 #4 (1996): 27-33. <UMN>

Karplus, Walter J.  Analog Simulation. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1958.

Mindell, David. "Anti-Aircraft Fire Control at Sperry, 1925-1940." IEEE Control Systems (April 1995): 108-13.

Mindell, David. Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing Before Cybernetics.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 2002.

Owens, Larry. "Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer." Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 63-95. <UMN>

Preston, Frank. "Vannevar Bush's network analyzer at MIT" IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (Jan-Mar 2003): 75-78.

Puchta, S.  "On the role of mathematics and mathematical knowledge in the invention of Vannevar Bush's early analog computers."  Annals of the History of Computing 18 #4 (1996): 49-59 <UMN>

Small, J.S.  "General-purpose electronic analog computing: 1945-1965."  Annals of the History of Computing 15 #2 (1993): 8-18. <UMN>

Small, James S. The Analogue Alternative:The Electronic Analogue Computer in Britain and the USA, 1930-1975.  New York/London: Routledge, 2001.

Tympas, A.  "From digital to analog and back: the ideology of intelligent machines in the history of the electrical analyzer, 1870s-1960s." Annals of the History of Computing 18 #4 (1996): 42-48. <UMN>

Van den Ende, Jan.  "Tidal calculations in the Netherlands, 1920-60."  Annals of the History of Computing 14 #3 (1992): 23-33. <UMN>

The Digital Divide (1935-55)

• ENIAC online documents
• ENIAC et al. online images
• Karl Kempf, Electronic Computers within the Ordnance Corps [ENIAC, EDVAC, ORDVAC, et al.] (1961 monograph)

Bashe, Charles J. (et al.)  IBM's early computers.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.

Burks, Alice Rowe.  Who Invented the Computer? The Legal Battle That Changed Computing History.  Prometheus Books, 2003.

Amazon.com: In 1941, physicist John Mauchly visited his colleague John Atanasoff at Iowa State University for a few days, during which they discussed the computer Atanasoff was working on, later called the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC). Within five years, Mauchly would be celebrated as one of the men responsible for the ENIAC, often referred to as the first computer. Thirty years later, what happened during that visit would become the core of a lengthy patent case and grist for countless speculative articles. Was the ENIAC based on the ABC? In 1973, Judge Earl L. Larson ruled in Atanasoff's favor, effectively declaring him the inventor of the computer as we know it. Among aficionados of the history of computing, there's widespread feeling that Larson blew the call, and it is this perception that Burks is intent on demolishing. Exhaustively citing the trial transcript as well as the conflicted reaction of the computing community, the author amply demonstrates Atanasoff's credibility and Mauchly's evasiveness about that meeting. She also persuasively demonstrates the manifold leap forward the ABC represented.

Burks, Arthur W.  The first electronic computer: the Atanasoff story.  Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1988.

Carpenter, B.E. and R.W. Doran.  A.M. Turing's ACE report of 1946 and other papers.  Cambridge: MIT Press/Los Angeles: Tomash Publishers, 1986.

Ceruzzi, Paul E.  Reckoners: the prehistory of the digital computer, from relays to the stored program concept, 1935-1945.  Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1983.  [ WWW version available at <www.ed-thelen.org> ]

Cohen, I. Bernard.  Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer.  MIT Press, 1999. 

Copeland, B.J. Colossus: its origins and originators.  Annals of the History of Computing 26 #4 (Oct.-Dec. 2004): 38-45. <UMN>

Grier, D.A. "Agricultural computing and the context for John Atanasoff." Annals of the History of Computing 22 #1 (2000): 48-61. <UMN>

Gruenberger, F.J. 1979. "History of the Johnniac." Annals of the History of Computing 1(1):49-64. <UMN>

Hodges, Andrew.  Alan Turing: The Enigma.  New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983.

Longo, B. "Edmund Berkeley, computers, and modern methods of thinking." Annals of the History of Computing 26 #4 (Oct.-Dec. 2004): 4-18. <UMN>

Lundstrom, David E.  A Few Good Men from UNIVAC.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987.  [memoir on rise of Control Data from Univac division of Sperry Rand; Univac and the Naval Tactical Data System; CDC's top designer Seymour Cray]

Norberg, Arthur L.  Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957.  Cambridge: MIT Press 2005.

Owens, Larry. "Where are we going Phil Morse? Changing Agendas and the Rhetoric of Obviousness in the Transformation of Computing at MIT, 1939-1957."  IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18 #4 (1996): 34-41. <UMN>

Pugh, Emerson W.  Building IBM: shaping an industry and its technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Randell, Brian (ed.).  The origins of digital computers: selected papers.  Berlin/New York: Springer-Verlag, 1975.

Redmond, Kent C., and Thomas M. Smith.  1980.  Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer.  Bedford, Mass.: Digital Press.

Redmond, Kent C., and Thomas M. Smith, From Whirlwind to MITRE: The R&D Story of The SAGE Air Defense Computer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000.

Rees, Mina.  "The Computing Program of the Office of Naval Research, 1946-1953." Annals of the History of Computing 4 #2 (1982) 102-120; reprinted in Communications of the ACM 30 #10  (October 1987): 832 - 848. <WWW> (Oct. 2003)

Riordan, Michael, and Lillian Hoddeson.  1997.  Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age.  New York: Norton. [history of solid-state physics and invention of transistor at Bell Labs]

Rope, C.  ENIAC as a Stored-Program Computer: A New Look at the Old Records.  Annals of the History of Computing 29 #4 (Oct.-Dec. 2007): 82-87. <UMN>

Stern, Nancy B.  From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers.  Bedford, Mass.: Digital Press, 1981.

Wilkes, Maurice V.  Memoirs of a Computer Pioneer. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985.

Commerce and Science (1950-70s)

Campbell-Kelly, Martin, and Daniel D. Garcia-Swartz. "Economic Perspectives on the History of the Computer Time-Sharing Industry, 1965-1985." Annals of the History of Computing 30 #1 (Jan.-March 2008): 16-36. <UMN>

Cortada, James W. "Commercial applications of the digital computer in American corporations, 1945-1995." Annals of the History of Computing 18 #2 (Summer 1996): 18-29. <UMN>

Cortada, James W. "Studying the Role of IT in the Evolution of American Business Practices" Annals of the History of Computing 29 #4 (Oct.-Dec. 2007): 28-39. <UMN>

Crowe, G.D.; Goodman, S.E. "S.A. Lebedev and the birth of Soviet computing." Annals of the History of Computing 16 #1 (Spring 1994): 4-24. <UMN>

Ferry, Georgina.  A Computer Called LEO: Lyons Teashop and the World's First Office Computer.  London: Fourth Estate, 2003. [a pioneering computer as the result of consumer-driven innovation in Britain]

Gray, George T. and Ronald Q. Smith. "Before the B5000: Burroughs Computers, 1951-1963." Annals of the History of Computing 25:2 (April-June 2003): 50-61. <UMN>

Gray, George T. and Ronald Q. Smith. "Sperry Rand's transistor computers." Annals of the History of Computing 20 #3 (July-Sept. 1998): 16-26. <UMN>

Gray, George T. and Ronald Q. Smith. "Sperry Rand's third-generation computers 1964-1980." Annals of the History of Computing 23 #1 (Jan.-March 2001): 3-16. <UMN>

Head, R.V. "ERMA's lost battalion." Annals of the History of Computing 23 #3 (July-Sept. 2001): 64-72 [General Electric's effort at computerizing check-clearing in the 1950s] <UMN>

Irvine, M.M. "Early digital computers at Bell Telephone Laboratories." Annals of the History of Computing 23 #3 (July-Sept. 2001): 22-42. <UMN>

Kluver, P.V. "From research institute to computer company: Regnecentralen 1946-1964." Annals of the History of Computing 21 #2 (April-June 1999): 31-43. <UMN>

Lee, J.A.N.; Snively, G.E. "The rise and sale of the General Electric Computer Department: a further look." Annals of the History of Computing 22 #2 (April-June 2000): 53-60. <UMN>

Lee, J.A.N.; Burke, C.; Anderson, D. "The US Bombes, NCR, Joseph Desch, and 600 WAVES: the first reunion of the US Naval Computing Machine Laboratory." Annals of the History of Computing 22 #3 (July-Sept. 2000): 27-41. <UMN>

MacKenzie, Donald. "The Influence of the Los Alamos and Livermore National Labs on Supercomputing." Annals of the History of Computing 13 no. 2 (1991): 179-201. <UMN>

McKenney, J.L.; Fisher, A.W. "Manufacturing the ERMA banking system: lessons from history." Annals of the History of Computing 15 #4  (1993): 7-26. [General Electric's computerizing check-clearing in the 1950s] <UMN>

Norberg, Arthur L.  Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-Mauchly Computer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remington Rand, 1946-1957.  Cambridge: MIT Press 2005.

Oldfield, H.R. "General Electric enters the computer business-revisited." Annals of the History of Computing 17 #4 (Winter 1995): 46-55. <UMN>

Pugh, Emerson W.  Memories that shaped an industry: decisions leading to IBM System/360.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1984.

Pugh, Emerson W.  Building IBM: shaping an industry and its technology. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1995.

Pugh, Emerson W., Lyle R. Johnson, and John H. Palmer.  IBM's 360 and early 370 systems.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991.

Stern, Nancy B.  From ENIAC to UNIVAC: An Appraisal of the Eckert-Mauchly Computers.  Bedford, Mass.: Digital Press, 1981.

Usselman, Steven W. "IBM and Its Imitators: Organizational Capabilities and the Emergence of the International Computer Industry." Business and Economic History 22 #2 (Winter 1993): 1-35.  <WWW> (Sept. 2003)

Yates, JoAnne.  2005.  Structuring the Information Age: Life Insurance and Technology in the Twentieth Century.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Yost, Jeffrey R.  A Bibliographic Guide to Resources in Scientific Computing, 1945-1975.  Greenwood Press, 2002.

Computers and Cold War (1950s-80s) [see also Military Microelectronics]

Akera, Atsushi. Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of U.S. Cold War Research.  MIT Press 2006 <MIT Press>

Annals of the History of Computing: special issue on SAGE vol. 5 #4 (1981). <UMN>

Aspray, William, and Bernard O. Williams. 1994. "Arming American Scientists: NSF and the Provision of Scientific Computing Facilities for Universities, 1950-1973." Annals of the History of Computing 16(4):60-74. <UMN>

Baum, Claude. 1981. The System Builders: The Story of SDC. Santa Monica: System Development Corporation.

Borning, Alan "Computer System Reliability and Nuclear War." Communications of the ACM 30 #2  (February 1987): 112-131 <WWW> (Oct. 2003)

"on October 5, 1960, the warning system at NORAD indicated that the United States was under massive attack by Soviet missiles with a certainty of 99.9 percent. It turned out that the BMEWS radar in Thule, Greenland, had spotted the rising moon. Nobody had thought about the moon when specifying how the system should act."

Edwards, Paul N.  The Closed World: computers and the politics of discourse in Cold War America. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996.

Flamm, Kenneth.  1988.  Creating the Computer: Government, Industry and High Technology.  Washington: Brookings Institution.

Forman, Paul. "Behind Quantum Electronics: National Security as Basis for Physical Research in the United States, 1940-1960." Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 18 (1985): 149-229.

Hughes, Agatha C., and Thomas P. Hughes, eds., Systems, Experts, and Computers: The Systems Approach in Management and Engineering, World War II and After. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000

Hughes, Thomas P.  1998.  Rescuing Prometheus: The Story of the Mammoth Project Sage, ICBM, Arpanet and Boston's Central Artery/Tunnel That Created New Styles of Management.  Pantheon. [case studies of SAGE bomber defense, Atlas missile, ARPANET, and Boston's Central Artery projects]

IBM's "On Guard" 1956 video at youtube (10 min.) | part 2 (2 min.)

Jacobs, John F. The SAGE Air Defense System: A Personal History. MITRE Corporation, 1986.

Kahn, D. 1967. The Codebreakers: The Story of Secret Writing. Macmillan, New York.

Leslie, Stuart W.  1993.  The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford.  New York: Columbia University Press. [available online as <ACLS Humanities Book>]

Mindell, David A. Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight.  Cambridge: MIT Press 2008.

Misa, Thomas J. "Military Needs, Commercial Realities, and the Development of the Transistor, 1948-1958," in Merritt Roe Smith (ed.), Military Enterprise and Technological Change (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1985), pp. 253-87.

Noble, David F.  1984.  Forces of Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation.  New York: Knopf.

Norberg, Arthur L., and Judy E. O'Neill.  1996.   Transforming Computer Technology: Information Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986.  Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Redmond, Kent C. and Thomas M. Smith.  1980.  Project Whirlwind: The History of a Pioneer Computer.  Bedford, Mass.: Digital Press.

Rees, Mina.  "The Computing Program of the Office of Naval Research, 1946-1953." Annals of the History of Computing 4 #2 (1982) 102-120; reprinted in Communications of the ACM 30 #10  (October 1987): 832 - 848. <WWW> (Oct. 2003)

Software and AI (1950s-90s)

Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Sigplan. 1978. A History of Programming Languages, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Programming Languages. Academic Press, Los Angeles, Calif.

Backus, John. 1979. "The History of FORTRAN I, II, and III." Annals of the History of Computing 1 #1 (Jan.-March 1979): 21-37. <UMN>

Campbell-Kelly, Martin.  From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.  [the first book-length study of the software industry: software contractors and programming service providers in the 1950s; corporate software products in the 1960s; personal-computing software in the 1980s --- e.g. FORTRAN, COBOL, SDC, SAGE and SABRE, IBM System/360, Gates and Microsoft]

Campbell-Kelly, Martin. "Number Crunching without Programming: The Evolution of Spreadsheet Usability." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29 no. 3 (2007): 6-19 <UMN>

Haigh, Thomas. " Remembering the Office of the Future: The Origins of Word Processing and Office Automation." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28 no. 4 (2006): 6-31 <UMN>

Hashagen, Ulf, Reinhard Keil-Slawik, and Arthur L. Norberg, eds. History of Computing: Software Issues (Berlin/New York: Springer, 2002)

McCarthy, John. 1981. "History of Lisp," in Richard Wexelblat, ed., History of Programming Languages. Academic Press, New York. [available online at <www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html>]

MacKenzie, Donald. Mechanizing Proof: Computing, Risk, and Trust. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

Mahoney, Michael S. "What Makes the History of Software Hard." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 30 no. 3 (July-Sept. 2008): 8-18

Roland, Alex, and Philip Shiman.  Strategic Computing: DARPA and the Quest for Machine Intelligence, 1983-1993. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.

Wexelblat, Richard, ed., History of Programming Languages. Academic Press, New York, 1981.
 

Minicomputers, Chips, and Change (1960s-80s)

Aspray, William. "The Intel 4004 microprocessor: what constituted invention?" Annals of the History of Computing 19 #3 (1997): 4-15. <UMN>

Bassett, Ross Knox.  To the Digital Age: Research Labs, Start-Up Companies, and the Rise of MOS Technology.  Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2002.

Braun, Ernest, and Stuart Macdonald.  1982.  Revolution in Miniature: The History and Impact of Semiconductor Electronics.  Cambridge University Press; 2nd ed.

Gray, G.T., and R.Q. Smith.  "Sperry Rand's third-generation computers 1964-1980."  Annals of the History of Computing 23 #1 (2001): 3-16. <UMN>

Greenstein, Shane M. "Lock-in and the costs of switching mainframe computer vendors in the U.S. federal government in the 1970s." Annals of the History of Computing 17 #3 (Fall 1995): 58-66. <UMN>

Harrar, George.  The Ultimate Entrepreneur: The Story of Ken Olsen and Digital Equipment Corporation (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1988).

Jackson, Tim.  Inside Intel: Andy Grove and the rise of the world's most powerful chip company.  New York, N.Y.: Dutton, 1997.

Jones, Douglas W. "The Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8" <www.cs.uiowa.edu/~jones/pdp8/> (Aug. 2007)  [wide-ranging WWW site with links to FAQs, programmers manuals, a brief history]

Kidder, Tracy.  1981.  The Soul of a New Machine.  Boston: Little, Brown; reprinted Back Bay Books, 2000. [wonderful portrait of Data General, a once-great mini-computer company]

Malone, Michael S. 1995. The Microprocessor: A Biography.  New York: Springer-Verlag.

Mollick, Ethan.  "Establishing Moore's Law."  IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28 #3 (July-Sept. 2006): 62-75. <UMN>

Morris, P.R.  A History of the World Semiconductor Industry (London: P. Peregrinus/Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1990).

Noyce, R.N., and M.E. Hoff, "A History of Microprocessor Development at Intel."   IEEE Micro 1 #1 (Feb. 1981): 8-21.

Pearson, Jamie Parker.  Digital at Work (Digital, 1992) [history of the Digital Equipment Company]

Schein, Edgar H.  DEC Is Dead, Long Live DEC: The Lasting Legacy of Digital Equipment Corporation.  Berrett-Koehler Publishers,  2003.

Thomas, P.A.V.  "Solidac: an early minicomputer for teaching purposes."  Annals of the History of Computing 15 #4 (1993): 79-83. <UMN>

 

Personal Computers (1970-90s)

Atkinson, Bill, and Andy Hertzfeld, oral history at Computer History Museum (June 8, 2004) <www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102658007>

Bardini, Thierry.  Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, coevolution, and the origins of personal computing.  Stanford University Press, 2000. 

Chposky, James, and Ted.  Blue magic: the people, power, and politics behind the IBM personal computer.  New York, NY: Facts on File, 1988.

Cusumano, Michael A. Microsoft Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates Technology, Shapes Markets and Manages People. New York: Free Press, 1998.

Freiberger, Paul, and Michael Swaine.  Fire in the Valley: The making of the personal computer.  New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000. 2nd ed.

Guterl, Fred. "Design Case History: Apple's Macintosh." IEEE Spectrum (Dec. 1984): 34-43. <WWW> (Sept. 2003)

Grossman, Wendy (ed.).  1997.  Remembering the Future: Interviews from Personal Computer World.  Springer Verlag.

Hiltzik, Michael.  Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.  New York: Harper, 1999.

Jobs, Steve [Smithsonian Institution oral history 1995] <americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/sj1.html>

Johnson, Steven. Interface Culture (1997) chapter 2: "Desktop" <WWW> (Sept. 2003)

Levy, Steven.  1994.  Insanely Great: The Life and Time of Macintosh, the computer that changed everything.  New York: Viking. [see also Guterl (1984).]

Linzmayer, Owen W.  Apple Confidential: The Real Story of Apple Computer, Inc.  No Starch Press, 1999.

"Making the Macintosh: Technology and Culture in Silicon Valley" <library.stanford.edu/mac> (Jan. 2009)

Malone, Michael.  Infinite loop: how [Apple] the world's most insanely great computer company went insane.  New York: Currency/Doubleday, 1999. 

Markoff, John.  What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry.  New York: Viking Penguin, 2005

Moritz, Michael.  The little kingdom: the private story of Apple Computer. New York: Morrow, 1984.

Sloan MouseSite (on Douglas Engelbart)  <sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/>

Sumner, James. "What Makes a PC? Thoughts on Computing Platforms, Standards, and Compatibility" Annals of the History of Computing 29 #2 (April-June 2007): 88. <UMN>

"Triumph of the Nerds" (PBS 1996):

• Transcript (3 parts)
• Part 1: YouTube: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
• Part 2: YouTube: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
• Part 3: YouTube: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 |
  

Turner, Fred.  From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism.  University Of Chicago Press, 2006.

Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. Penguin, 2002.

Networked World (1980-present)

Abbate, Janet.  Inventing the Internet.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

Aspray, William, and Paul E. Ceruzzi, eds. The Internet and American Business.  MIT Press: March 2008 <MIT Press>

Berners-Lee, Tim. "Web Architecture from 50,000 Feet." <www.w3.org/DesignIssues/Architecture.html> (23 July 2001)

Berners-Lee, Tim. "Realising the Full Potential of the Web." <www.w3.org/1998/02/Potential.html> (July 2001)

Berners-Lee, Tim. Weaving the Web.  New York: HarperBusiness, 1999.

Berners-Lee, Tim, James Hendler, and Ora Lassila, "The Semantic Web," Scientific American (May 2001) <www.sciam.com/2001/0501issue/0501berners-lee.html> (August 2001).

Brody, Herb. "The Web Maestro: An Interview with Tim Berners-Lee." Technology Review (July 1996): 34-40.

Burg, Urs von.  The Triumph of Ethernet: Technological Communities and the Battle for the LAN Standard.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001.

Bhushan, Abhay. 1972. File Transfer Protocol. Internet Request for Comment 354. July. RFC Editor, Information Sciences Institute, University of Southern California, Los Angeles. [online at <www.rfc-editor.org/rfc.html>]

Castells, Manuel. The rise of the network society.   Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1996.

Castells, Manuel.  End of millennium; The information age, economy, society, and culture; v. 3. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998.

Ceruzzi, Paul E. Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner, 1945-2005.  MIT Press, 2008 <MIT Press>

Clark, Jim.  Netscape time: the making of the billion-dollar start-up that took on Microsoft.  New York: St. Martin's Press, 1999.

Cortada, James W. "Studying the Role of IT in the Evolution of American Business Practices: A Way Forward."  Annals of the History of Computing 29 #4 (Oct.-Dec. 2007): 28-39. <UMN>

Frana, Phil. "Before the Web there was Gopher" Annals of the History of Computing 26 #1 (Jan-Mar 2004): 20-41. <UMN>

Hafner, Katie, and Matthew Lyon.  1996.  Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet.  Simon & Schuster.

Hsu, Feng-Hsiung. Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer That Defeated the World Chess Champion. Princeton Univ. Press, 2002.

Ito, Mizuko, Daisuke Okabe and Misa Matsuda, eds. Personal, Portable, Pedestrian: Mobile Phones in Japanese Life.  MIT Press 2005 <MIT Press>

Kesan, Jay P. and Rajiv C. Shah, "Fool Us Once Shame On You - Fool Us Twice Shame On Us: What We Can Learn From the Privatizations of the Internet Backbone Network and the Domain Name System," Washington University Law Quarterly 79 (2001): 89-220.  <papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=260834> (Sept. 2003)

Kesan, Jay P. and Rajiv C. Shah, "Deconstructing Code," Yale Journal of Law & Technology 6 (2003-2004): 277-389.

Kesan, Jay P. and Rajiv C. Shah, "Shaping Code," Harvard Journal of Law & Technology 18, no. 2 (Spring 2005): 319-399.

Leiner, Barry M., Vinton G. Cerf, David D. Clark, Robert E. Kahn, Leonard Kleinrock, Daniel C. Lynch, Jon Postel, Larry Roberts, and Stephen Wolff. A Brief History of the Internet. [online at <www.isoc.org/internet/history/brief.shtml> version 3.3.2 (Dec. 2003); see also Internet Society's "Histories of the Internet"]

Quittner, Joshua and Michelle Slatalla. Speeding the Net: The inside story of Netscape and how it challenged Microsoft. New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 1998.

Partridge, Craig. "The Technical Development of Internet Email" Annals of the History of Computing 30 #2 (April-June 2008): 3-29. <UMN>

Psikotic. "The Internet" (rap song).  Download from BellicoseStudio.com (play track) | Last.fm

Russell, Andrew L.   "'Rough Consensus and Running Code' and the Internet-OSI Standards War."  IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28 #3 (July-Sept. 2006): 48-61. <UMN>

SRI International. 1997. "The Internet," Chapter IV in The Role of NSF's Support of Engineering in Enabling Technological Innovation. SRI International, Arlington, Va. [online at <unix.sri.com/policy/stp/techin/inter1.html>]

Torvalds, Linus, and David Diamond.  Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary. HarperBusiness, 2001.

Turkle, Sherry.  Life on the Screen: Identify in the Age of the Internet.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995.

Ullman, Ellen.  1997.  Close to the Machine.  San Francisco: City Lights. [Computer programmers--Biography]

Waldrop, M. Mitchell. The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal. Penguin, 2002.

Yost, Jeffrey R. "Computers and the Internet: Braiding Irony, Paradox, and Possibility," in Carroll Pursell, ed. Companion to American Technology.  Oxford: Blackwell, 2005, pp. 340-360

MIT  [see also History of Engineering--MIT]

Lecuyer, Christopher. "The Making of a Science Based Technological University: Karl Compton, James Killian, and the Reform of MIT, 1930-1957." Historical Studies in the Physical and Biological Sciences 23 (1992): 153-180.

Leslie, Stuart W.  1993.  The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford.  New York: Columbia University Press. [available online as <ACLS Humanities Book>]

Owens, Larry. "Vannevar Bush and the Differential Analyzer: The Text and Context of an Early Computer," Technology and Culture 27 (1986): 63-95.

Owens, Larry. "Where are we going Phil Morse? Changing Agendas and the Rhetoric of Obviousness in the Transformation of Computing at MIT, 1939-1957" Annals of the History of Computing 18 #4 (1996): 34-41. <UMN>

Peterson, T. F., and Jane Pickering.  Nightwork: A History of Hacks and Pranks at MIT.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003.

Seely, Bruce. "Research, Engineering, and Science in American Engineering Colleges, 1900-1960." Technology and Culture 34 (1993): 344-386.

White, Pepper.  1991.  The Idea Factory: Learning to Think at MIT.  New York: Dutton.

Wiener, Norbert [1894-1964].  1993.  Invention: the care and feeding of ideas.  Cambridge: MIT Press.

Wildes, Karl L. and Nilo A. Lindgren.  1985.  A Century of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, 1882-1982.  Cambridge: MIT Press.

Zachary, G. Pascal.  Endless Frontier: Vannevar Bush, Engineer of the American Century.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999; orig. NY: Free Press, 1997.

Silicon Valley

Berlin, Leslie.  The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley.  Oxford University Press, 2005.

Gillmor, C. Stewart.  Fred Terman at Stanford: Building a Discipline, a University, and Silicon Valley.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004.

Jackson, Tim.  Inside Intel: Andy Grove and the rise of the world's most powerful chip company.  New York, N.Y.: Dutton, 1997.

Kaplan, David A.  The Silicon Boys and Their Valley of Dreams.  New York: Perennial, 2000.

Kidder, Tracy.  1981.  The Soul of a New Machine.  Boston: Little, Brown.  [wonderful portrait of Data General, a once-great computer company]

Hiltzik, Michael.  Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age.  New York: Harper, 1999.

Lecuyer, Christophe.  Making Silicon Valley: Innovation and the Growth of High Tech, 1930-1970.  MIT Press, 2005. <MIT Press>

Leslie, Stuart W.  1993.  The Cold War and American Science: The Military-Industrial-Academic Complex at MIT and Stanford.  New York: Columbia University Press. [available online as <ACLS Humanities Book>]

Lowen, Rebecca S. Creating the Cold War University: The Transformation of Stanford.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

McKendrick, David G., Richard F. Doner, Stephan Haggard.  From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry.  Stanford Univ. Press, 2000.

Noyce, R.N., and M.E. Hoff, "A History of Microprocessor Development at Intel."   IEEE Micro 1 #1 (Feb. 1981): 8-21.

O'Mara, Margaret Pugh.  Cities of Knowledge: Cold War Science and the Search for the Next Silicon Valley.  Princeton University Press, 2004.

Packard, David.  The HP way: How Bill Hewlett and I built our company.  New York: HarperBusiness, 1996.

Riordan, Michael, and Lillian Hoddeson.  1997.  Crystal Fire: The Birth of the Information Age.  New York: Norton. [invention of transistor at Bell Labs: Schockley's move to Palo Alto, Fairchild Semiconductor]

Rogers, Everett M. & Judith K. Larsen. Silicon Valley fever: growth of high-technology culture. New York: Basic Books, 1984.

Saxenian, Annalee. Regional Advantage: Culture and Competition in Silicon Valley and Route 128.   Harvard Univ. Press, 1996.

"Secret History of Silicon Valley" <www.youtube.com> [Steve Blank discusses the military's role in building what became Silicon Valley, at a Google TechTalk lecture] (Dec. 2007)

Silicon Valley History Online <www.siliconvalleyhistory.org> database with historic photos of agriculture, transportation, urban life, non-/famous people, technology -- Intel chips

"Silicon Valley: center of a modern renaissance, 1890s-1970s."  Princeton, NJ : Films for the Humanities and Sciences, 1999.

The history of the Silicon Valley region of California from the 1890s through the 1970s from the foundation of Stanford University to the rise of the semiconductor and microprocessor industries. In this program, inventors of the disk drive, semiconductor and microprocessor, the founders of Intel, Netscape, Atari, Hewlett-Packard, Fairchild and Intuit, the former president of Stanford University and others discuss the synergy within this unique community that made innovation the number one product.

TAJNAI, CAROLYN E. "FRED TERMAN, THE FATHER OF SILICON VALLEY" Stanford Univ. MAY, 1985. <www.netvalley.com/archives/mirrors/terman.html> (Sept 2003)

Policy and International Studies

Agar, Jon. The Government Machine: A Revolutionary History of the Computer.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003

Fitzpatrick, Anne, S. Berkovich, T. Kazokova. " MESM and the Beginning of the Computer Era in the Soviet Union."  IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28 no. 3 (2006): 4-16 <UMN>

Flamm, Kenneth.  1988.  Creating the Computer: Government, Industry and High Technology.  Washington: Brookings Institution.

Gerovitch, Slava.  From Newspeak to Cyberspeak: A History of Soviet Cybernetics.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002

Hendry, John.  Innovating for Failure: Government Policy and the Early British Computer Industry.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990. [details ten years of effort by the NRDC to establish a British computer industry able to compete internationally, particularly with IBM]

Jiuchun, Zhang, and Zhang Baichun.  "Founding of the Chinese Academy of Sciences' Institute of Computing Technology."  IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 29 no. 1 (2007): 16-33 <UMN>

McKendrick, David G., Richard F. Doner, Stephan Haggard.  From Silicon Valley to Singapore: Location and Competitive Advantage in the Hard Disk Drive Industry.  Stanford Univ Press, 2000.

Medina, Eden.  "Designing Freedom, Regulating a Nation: Socialist Cybernetics in Allende’s Chile." Journal of Latin American Studies 38 (2006): 571-606

Morris, P.R.  A History of the World Semiconductor Industry (London: P. Peregrinus/Institution of Electrical Engineers, 1990).

National Research Council. Funding a Revolution: Government Support for Computing Research.  Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1999 [available online at <www.nap.edu/readingroom/books/far/contents.html>]

• ch. 4 "Organization of Federal Support: A Historical Overview" [1945-90s]

Case Studies:

• ch. 6 "Rise of Relational Databases"
• ch. 7 "Development of the Internet and World Wide Web"
• ch. 8 "Theoretical Research: Computer Science"
• ch. 9 "Developments in Artificial Intelligence"
• ch. 10 "Virtual Reality Comes of Age"

Okimoto, Daniel I., Takuo Sugano, and Franklin B. Weinstein (eds.).  Competitive edge: the semiconductor industry in the U.S. and Japan.  Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1984.

Rojas, Raul, and Ulf Hashagen, eds.  The First Computers: History and Architectures.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. [architectures of the first computers built in the United States, Germany, England, and Japan]

Schlombs, Corinna. "Toward International Computing History." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 28 #1 (2006): 108 <UMN>

Vardalas, John N.  The Computer Revolution in Canada: Building National Technological Competence.  Cambridge: MIT Press, 2001.

Wilson, Robert W., Peter K. Ashton, Thomas P. Egan.  Innovation, competition, and government policy in the semiconductor industry.  Lexington, Mass.: Lexington Books, 1980.

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