Computer History

Are you curious about the future of computing but confused about where to start? Are you fascinated by the quantum buzz but intimidated by dense academic jargon? I'm here to guide you through the fascinating universe of quantum tech, in the simplest way possible. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, software developer, eager student, or an innovator at heart, this book is tailored for minds like yours. I've translated qubits, quantum gates, and superposition in a refreshingly easy way, so you don't need a PhD to come along for the ride.

The world is never finished catching up with Vaclav Smil. In his latest and perhaps most digestible book, Invention and Innovation, the prolific author—a favorite of Bill Gates—pens an insightful and fact-filled jaunt through the history of human invention. Impatient with the hype that so often accompanies innovation, Smil offers in this book a clear-eyed corrective to the overpromises that accompany everything from new cures for diseases to AI.

Illustrating data feminism in action, D'Ignazio and Klein show how challenges to the male/female binary can help challenge other hierarchical (and empirically wrong) classification systems. They explain how, for example, an understanding of emotion can expand our ideas about effective data visualization, and how the concept of invisible labor can expose the significant human efforts required by our automated systems. And they show why the data never, ever "speak for themselves."

In The Second Machine Age MIT's Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee—two thinkers at the forefront of their field—reveal the forces driving the reinvention of our lives and our economy. As the full impact of digital technologies is felt, we will realize immense bounty in the form of dazzling personal technology, advanced infrastructure, and near-boundless access to the cultural items that enrich our lives. Amid this bounty will also be wrenching change. Recent economic indicators reflect this shift: fewer people are working, and wages are falling even as productivity and profits soar.

La biografía definitiva de Steve Jobs, el fundador de Apple, escrita con su colaboración.Tras más de cuarenta entrevistas con Steve Jobs y con un centenar de personas de su entorno, familiares, amigos, adversarios y colegas, esta es la biografía definitiva de uno de los iconos indiscutibles de nuestro tiempo, del genio cuya creatividad, energía y perfeccionismo revolucionaron seis industrias: informática, películas de animación, música, teléfonos, tabletas y edición digital.

In this fascinating book, investigative reporter Yasha Levine uncovers the secret origins of the Internet, tracing it back to a Pentagon counterinsurgency surveillance project. With deep research, skilled storytelling, and provocative arguments, Surveillance Valley will change the way you think about the news - and the device on which you read it.

Over his four-decade career, Sid Meier has produced some of the world's most popular video games, including Sid Meier's Civilization, which has sold more than 51 million units worldwide and accumulated more than one billion hours of play. Sid Meier's Memoir! is the story of an obsessive young computer enthusiast who helped launch a multibillion-dollar industry.

People are now exposed to more information than ever before, provided both by technology and by increasing access to every level of education. These societal gains, however, have also helped fuel a surge in narcissistic and misguided intellectual egalitarianism that has crippled informed debates on any number of issues. Today, everyone knows everything and all voices demand to be taken with equal seriousness, and any claim to the contrary is dismissed as undemocratic elitism.

If you want to avoid getting hacked, having your information spread, and risking financial loss, then pay attention.... Do you create tons of accounts you will never again visit? Does your password contain a sequence of numbers, such as “123456”? Do you automatically click all links and download all email attachments coming from your friends? This audiobook will show you just how incredibly lucky you are that nobody's hacked you before.

The inventor of the World Wide Web explores his vision’s promise—and how it can be redeemed for the future. This audiobook is read by award-winning comedian, actor, presenter and director, Sir Stephen Fry. It also includes a bonus conversation between the author and narrator. "Narrator...

In March 2006, the world’s richest men sipped champagne in an opulent New York hotel. They were preparing to compete in a poker tournament with ­million-dollar stakes. At the card table that night was Peter Muller, who managed a fabulously successful hedge fund called PDT. With him was Ken...

A New York Times technology correspondent presents the dramatic rise and fall of Uber, set against the rapid upheaval in Silicon Valley during the mobile era. Based on hundreds of interviews with current and former Uber employees, along with previously unpublished documents, Super Pumped is a pause-resisting story of ambition and deception, obscene wealth, and bad behavior, that explores how blistering technological and financial innovation culminated in one of the most catastrophic 12-month periods in American corporate history.

Before cell phones that fit in the palm of your hand and slim laptops that fit snugly into briefcases, computers were like strange, alien vending machines. They had cryptic switches, punch cards, and pages of encoded output. But in 1975, a young engineering wizard named Steve Wozniak had an idea: What if you combined computer circuitry with a regular typewriter keyboard and a video screen?

UNLOCK YOUR GAME'S NARRATIVE POTENTIAL! With increasingly sophisticated video games being consumed by an enthusiastic and expanding audience, the pressure is on game developers like never before to deliver exciting stories and engaging characters. With Video Game Storytelling, game writer and...

The grid is an accident of history and of culture, in no way intrinsic to how we produce, deliver and consume electrical power. Yet this is the system the United States ended up with, a jerry-built structure now so rickety and near collapse that a strong wind or a hot day can bring it to a grinding halt. The grid is now under threat from a new source: renewable and variable energy, which puts stress on its logics as much as its components.

Tracy Kidder's "riveting" (Washington Post) story of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market won both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award and has become essential reading for understanding the history of the American tech industry. Computers have changed since...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The bold futurist and renowned author of The Singularity Is Near explores the limitless potential of reverse-engineering the human brain. “This book is a Rosetta Stone for the mystery of human thought.”—Martine Rothblatt, chairman and CEO, United Therapeutics...

In the final decades of the 19th century, three brilliant and visionary titans of America's Gilded Age - Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, and George Westinghouse - battled as each vied to create a vast and powerful electrical empire. In Empires of Light, historian Jill Jonnes portrays this extraordinary trio and their riveting and ruthless world of cutting-edge science, invention, intrigue, money, death, and hard-eyed Wall Street millionaires.

The word spread through the hacking underground like some unstoppable new virus: Someone - some brilliant, audacious crook - had just staged a hostile takeover of an online criminal network that siphoned billions of dollars from the U.S. economy. The FBI rushed to launch an ambitious undercover operation aimed at tracking down this new kingpin. Other agencies around the world deployed dozens of moles and double agents.

Afrique 3.0 propose une voie réaliste, ambitieuse et profondément ancrée dans les réalités du continent. Porté par l’expérience d’un expert engagé dans les transformations digitales africaines, ce livre mêle récits historiques, diagnostics concrets et réflexions stratégiques. Il démontre qu’il est possible de faire beaucoup avec peu – à condition de penser frugal, d’agir agile, et de bâtir sur le capital humain africain.