[Air-L] History of Computers

[Jane Gruning]

Speaking of Douglas Englebart, for that part of the history of computing I
really enjoyed sociologist Theirry Bardini's excellent biography of
Englebart, *Bootstrapping - *although I probably wouldn't have attempted to
cover it in a 200-level class when I was teaching, so apologies to Adriana
for further hijacking the thread! But maybe it would be of interest to
others on the list. Particularly interesting for its coverage of the many
different input devices that Englebart invented (chord keyset etc.) and for
discussions of how computer users were "invented."

On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 3:10 AM Charles M. Ess <c.m.ess at media.uio.no> wrote:

> 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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> c.m.ess at media.uio.no
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