[Air-L] History of Computers

[Charles M. Ess]

Hi all,

this has been a really interesting thread to watch unfold (as usual): 
I've very much appreciated the various suggestions to the original query 
and now have a much richer reading list than before.

Perhaps more of an aside - and certainly beyond the remit of the 
original query, but if I were teaching such a course, I think I'd also 
want to include (which would also likely bump it up a bit in the 
academic curriculum?):

0) the proviso that my first hands-on computer was an analogue computer 
(sometime in the early 1960s) and as someone deeply immersed in 
mathematics and astronomy - and so my original senses of computers and 
computation is prior to and somewhat independent of the now predominant 
"digital" branch (there's still the analogue in there, but let's save 
that little story for another rainy day).

1) a look at the Sky-disk of Nebra - no moving parts, but at least as 
some astronomers have interpreted it, a "device" for coordinating the 
agricultural planting / harvesting seasons by way of keeping track of 
the lunar vs. solar cycles and marking the summer and winter solstices;

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nebra_sky_disk

2) some information about the discovery and various contemporary (lego / 
3d printed) recreations of the antikythera mechanism (ca. 2100 years 
old), a quite sophisticated analogue computer in the earlier senses;
(lots of good material online, including some fascinating videos on how 
contemporary mathematicians and engineers have made replicas)

3) Something about the dreams of calculation from mathematician / 
philosophers such as Leibniz and Kepler - in order to 
culturally-historically locate much of the motivation for the 
development of such devices as grounded in the Pythagorean dream / 
"religion" of understanding numbers and numerical relations as the truth 
of the universe - a truth with urgently salvific significance as this 
knowledge would then allow us to properly attune our lives to "the 
harmony of the spheres" and thereby attain some sort of "mind-meld" 
therewith ("God," in a non-theistic sense, for Aristotle and perhaps Plato);
[another aside: while Kepler completed the musical notation for the 
harmony of spheres based on his new-found mathematical model of the 
solar system as based on elliptical rather than circular orbits - it was 
only in the 1970s with the advent of electronic computers and 
synthesizers that the music could be "played".  I'm astonished that this 
realization of the 2600-year-old Pythagorean dream is not much more well 
known?]

4) the contributions of Douglas Engelbart, famous for screen-based 
interfaces and "the mouse" - again, for the sake of locating at least 
some portion of more contemporary motives in highly humanistic (if not 
forthrightly "classical," as in "3" above) approaches to computation as 
human augmentation and the broader "liberation technology" sensibilities 
of the 1960s-1980s (Stuart Brand et al.) -
but more originally rooted in the Romantic-Enlightenment coalescensces 
documented by Mark Coeckelbergh in his _New Romantic Cyborgs_ (MIT, 2017).

Not for the sake of Adriana de Souza e Silva's fortunate undergraduates 
but perhaps for the sake of a more expansive approach to the history of 
computing - what am I missing still?

again, many thanks and all best,
- charles ess

On 22/03/2019 20:11, Adriana de Souza e Silva wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I’m looking for a text (book, article, a few chapters) that tells the history of computers, starting from Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace’s Analytical Engine to present days. This is for a 200-level undergraduate class, so I’m trying to summarize the topic as much as possible, to give students a general overview in a couple of classes.
> 
> Any suggestions?
> _________________________
> Adriana de Souza e Silva
> University Faculty Scholar
> Professor
> Department of Communication
> http://www.souzaesilva.com
> 
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-- 
Professor in Media Studies
Department of Media and Communication
University of Oslo
<http://www.hf.uio.no/imk/english/people/aca/charlees/index.html>

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Blindern 0317
Oslo, Norway
c.m.ess at media.uio.no