Computer History

Engineering is everywhere, from the Large Hadron Collider to invisibly small circuits on silicon chips. The 50 Greatest Engineers celebrates the great achievements that have been made through the ages, containing profiles of the best-known and most innovative engineers of all time.

Empire of the Air tells the story of three American visionaries - Lee de Forest, Edwin Howard Armstrong, and David Sarnoff - whose imagination and dreams turned a hobbyist's toy into radio, launching the modern communications age. Tom Lewis weaves the story of these men and their achievements into a richly detailed and moving narrative that spans the first half of the 20th century, a time when the American romance with science and technology was at its peak.

The shocking untold story of the elite secret society of hackers fighting to protect our freedom, “a hugely important piece of the puzzle for anyone who wants to understand the forces shaping the internet age” (The New York Times Book Review) Cult of the Dead Cow is the tale of the oldest...

As Marc Raboy shows us in this enthralling and comprehensive biography, Marconi was the first truly global figure in modern communications. Born to an Italian father and an Irish mother, he was in many ways stateless, working his cosmopolitanism to advantage. Through a combination of skill, tenacity, luck, vision, and timing, Marconi popularized - and, more critically, patented - the use of radio waves.

For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue”—an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success. The company almost went out of business in the early 1990s, then came back strong with new business strategies and an emphasis on artificial intelligence. In this authoritative history, James Cortada tells the story of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.

Künstliche Intelligenz ist die Coming Wave, der nächste technologische Sprung, der sich nicht aufhalten lässt. Wir nähern uns einem kritischen Punkt in der Menschheitsgeschichte. Die Künstliche Intelligenz steht noch am Anfang, doch die Welle baut sich auf, und wir sind darauf nicht vorbereitet. Mustafa Suleyman ist Mitbegründer von DeepMind, dem KI-Pionier, der nun Teil von Alphabet ist, dem Google-Mutterkonzern. Er ist der ultimative KI-Insider. Sein Buch zeigt, was auf dem Spiel steht, und fragt, wie wir von den neuen Technologien profitieren können, ohne die Kontrolle zu verlieren.

Drones are in the newspaper, on the TV screen, swarming through the networks, and soon, we're told, they'll be delivering our shopping. But what are drones? The word encompasses everything from toys to weapons. And yet, as broadly defined as they are, the word “drone” fills many of us with a sense of technological dread. Adam Rothstein cuts through the mystery, the unknown, and the political posturing, and talks about what drones really are: what technologies are out there, and what’s coming next; how drones are talked about, and how they are represented in popular culture.

La confianza en la Inteligencia Artificial no es solo un requisito regulatorio, sino una cuestión de ética empresarial, conciencia cultural y diseño responsable. Este libro adopta un enfoque integral, revelando cómo los Sistemas de IA Confiables van más allá de algoritmos, servidores y bases de datos, para incluir también la apariencia, el entorno y a los humanos.

Two defense experts explore the collision of war, politics, and social media, where the most important battles are now only a click away. Through the weaponization of social media, the Internet is changing war and politics, just as war and politics are changing the Internet. Terrorists livestream their attacks, “Twitter wars” produce real world casualties, and viral misinformation alters not just the result of battles, but the very fate of nations. The result is that war, tech, and politics have blurred into a new kind of battlespace that plays out on our smartphones.

As robots are increasingly integrated into modern society—on the battlefield and the road, in business, education, and health—Pulitzer-Prize-winning New York Times science writer John Markoff searches for an answer to one of the most important questions of our age: will these machines help...

When John Campbell was hired in 1996, Michael Dell’s company was already a hyper-efficient technology upstart. By the time he left Dell in 2017, Michael’s little Texas-based catalog computer company had grown from 5,000 to 138,000 employees and evolved into one of the largest technology providers on the planet!

In Distracted, journalist Maggie Jackson ponders our increasingly cyber-centric world and fears we're entering a dark age of interruption that will render us unable to think critically, work creatively or cultivate meaningful relationships.

Worm: The First Digital World War tells the story of the Conficker worm, a potentially devastating piece of malware that has baffled experts and infected more than twelve million computers worldwide. When Conficker was unleashed in November 2008, cybersecurity experts did not know what to make of it. Exploiting security flaws in Microsoft Windows, it grew at an astonishingly rapid rate, infecting millions of computers around the world within weeks.

How we ultimately gained the American Customary System, the last traditional system in the world, and how Gunter's chain indelibly imprinted its dimensions on the land, on cities, and on our culture from coast to coast is both an exciting human and intellectual drama and one of the great untold stories in American history. Sagely argued and beautifully written, Measuring America offers readers nothing less than the opportunity to see America's history, and our democracy, in a brilliant new light.

Barely 50 years ago a computer was a gargantuan, vastly expensive thing that only a handful of scientists had ever seen. The world's brightest engineers were stymied in their quest to make these machines small and affordable until the solution finally came from two ingenious young Americans. Jack Kilby and Robert Noyce hit upon the stunning discovery that would make possible the silicon microchip, a work that would ultimately earn Kilby the Nobel Prize for physics in 2000.

The Internet Revolution: Power, Culture, and the Future of Society" explores the profound and transformative effects of the internet on various aspects of modern life. This comprehensive examination delves into how the internet has reshaped personal relationships, work-life integration, and social norms, while also addressing the rise of online communities and digital communication. The book investigates the dual role of internet memes in value expression and cultural identity, and highlights the global challenges of digital divides and cybersecurity.

If you want to learn key AI concepts to get you quickly up to speed with all things AI, then pay attention...This audiobook covers everything from machine learning to robotics and the internet of things. By the time you finish listening, you will be aware of what artificial neural networks are, how gradient descent and back propagation work, and what deep learning is. You will also learn a comprehensive history of AI, from the first invention of automations in antiquity to the driver-less cars of today.

In the 1970s, while their contemporaries were protesting the computer as a tool of dehumanization and oppression, a motley collection of college dropouts, hippies, and electronics fanatics were engaged in something much more subversive. Obsessed with the idea of getting computer power into their own hands, they launched from their garages a hobbyist movement that grew into an industry, and ultimately a social and technological revolution.

Homesteading Space is more than a story of technological and scientific success; it is also an absorbing, sometimes humorous, often inspiring account of the determined, hardworking individuals who shepherded the program through a near-disastrous launch, a heroic rescue, an exhausting study of Comet Kohoutek, and the lab's descent into the Indian Ocean. Featuring the unpublished in-flight diary of astronaut Alan Bean, it is replete with the personal recollections and experiences of the Skylab crew and those who worked with them in training, during the mission, and the return.

As we stand on the cusp of a new political reality, the contours of personal freedom and autonomy are becoming increasingly well-defined. The future holds the possibility of an existence where the barriers to living life on one’s own terms are ever-diminishing, where the power of voluntarily connected individuals challenges and reshapes the statist quo. Even though the journey toward this new reality is fraught with trade-offs and challenges, it has the potential for unprecedented freedom and philosophical fulfillment.