PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
FRS 159 - Fall 2007
Creating the Computer: From ENIAC to
the Internet
- Books to be Purchased (available at PU Store or online):
- Janet Abbate, Inventing the
Internet (MIT Press) [Amazon]
- Frederick P. Brooks, The Mythical Man-Month (20th
Anniversary edition; Addison Wesley) [Amazon]
- John Seely Brown and Paul Duguid, The Social Life of Information [Amazon}
- Lawrence Lessig, Code and
Other
Laws of Cyberspace (Basic Books) [Amazon]
or Code: Version 2.0 (Basic Books) [Amazon]
- Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray, Computer: A
History of the Information Machine (Westview Press) [Amazon]
As you will gather from the links, most of the readings are
online. Other readings will be handed out in class or will be on
reserve at Firestone Library.
- Week I (18 September) Getting Started: What do we
want to know?
- M.S.Mahoney, "The
History of Computing in the History of
Technology", Annals of the History of Computing
10(1988),
113-125 [pdf];
- and "Issues
in the History of Computing", in Thomas J. Bergin
and Rick G. Gibson (eds.), History of Programming Languages
II (NY: ACM Press, 1996), 772-81 [pdf]
- and "The
Histories of Computing(s)",
Interdisciplinary Science Reviews
30,2(2005), 119-135 [pdf];
- George H. Daniels, "The Big Questions in the History of American
Technology", Technology and Culture 11,1(1970), 1-21 [JSTOR]
- Week II (25 September) The Protean
Machine
- David
Barker-Plummer
, "Turing
Machines", Stanford Encyclopedia
of Philosophy
- Andrew Hodges, "Alan Turing", ibid.
- John
von Neumann, "First Draft of a Report on the Edvac" (1945), ed.
Michael D. Godfrey (pdf
version); cf. M.D. Godfrey and D.F. Hendry, "The Computer as von
Neumann Planned It", IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
15,1(1993) (pdf
version)
- Optional and Background
- William Aspray (ed.), Computing Before Computers
- Andrew Hodges, Alan Turing, The Enigma (visit
Hodge's extensive Turing
home
page, which includes a link to a working Turing
Machine applet)
- William Aspray, John von Neumann and the Origins of
Modern Computing
- Week III (2 October) Computers in the Business
World
- Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, Chaps. 1-6
- Thomas Haigh, "The Chromium-Plated Tabulator:
Institutionalizing an Electronic Revolution, 1954-1958", IEEE Annals
of the History of Computing 23,4(2001), 75-104 [PDF
(PU only)] [E-reserves]
- Thomas Haigh, "Inventing
Information Systems: The Systems Men and the Computer, 1950-1968",
The Business History Review 75, 1(2001), 15-61 [JSTOR]
- Martin Greenberger, "The
Computers of Tomorrow", Atlantic Monthly, May 1964
- Optional and Background
- James W. Cortada, The Computer in the United States:
From Laboratory to Market, 1930-1960
- Katharine Davis Fishman, The Computer Establishment
- Emerson W. Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and
its Technology
- John Hendry, Innovating For Failure: Government Policy
and the Early British Computer Industry
- David E. Lundstrom, A Few Good Men From Univac
- For other studies of the industry, check out the Firestone
shelves around call number HD9696.
- Week IV (9 October) Thinking with
Computers
- Campbell-Kelly & Aspray, Chap. 9
- Vannevar Bush, "As We
May Think".
That online copy has links, which are worth following out. The original
article appeared in Atlantic Monthly for July 1945, and
the magazine has also posted an online
version, and it was reprinted in ACM's interactions [pdf].
You will find a downloadable animation of the Memex
at the Dynamic Diagrams Interactive Publications site. Trevor
Smith at PARC is building a simulator called MemexSim.
- J.C.R. Licklider, "Man-Computer Symbiosis", IRE
Transactions on Human Factors in Electronics, HFE-1(1960), 4-11,
and "The Computer as Communication Device", Science and
Technology, April 1968 [reprints by Systems Research Center of
DEC, Palo Alto; also available online]
- Doug [Douglas C.] Engelbart, "The Augmented Knowledge Workshop",
in A History of Personal Workstations (ed. Adele
Goldberg; ACM Press, 1988) [pdf],
185-232; cf. his "Augmenting
Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework", prepared for the Air
Force Office of Scientific Research in 1962. Pictures
of the components of Engelbart's workstation and of the
environment at the ARC can be found at the site of his Bootstrap
Institute.
- Optional and Background
- Howard Rheingold, Tools
for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology
- James M. Nyce and Paul Kahn, From Memex to Hypertext:
Vannevar Bush and the Mind's Machine (Boston: Academic Press,
1991)
- On J.C.R. Licklider's leadership of DARPA's Information
Processing Technology Office, see Arthur L. Norberg and Judy
E. O'Neill, Transforming Computer Technology: Information
Processing for the Pentagon, 1962-1986 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1996)
- On Licklider, see A. Mitchell Waldrop, The Dream Machine: J.C.R.
Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal (Viking, 2001)
- Week V (16 October) - Thinking
Machines
- Alan
M. Turing, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence", Mind
59(1950) [JSTOR]
- John
McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester, Claude E. Shannon, A
Proposal for the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial
Intelligence (1956)
- Allen
Newell, "Intellectual Issues
in the History of Artificial Intelligence", in Fritz Machlup and Una
Mansfeld (eds.), The Study of Information: Interdisciplinary
Messages, 187-227
- John Searle, "Minds,
Brains, and Programs", in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences,
vol. 3; see also "Artificial
Intelligence: A
Debate" ( John
Searle vs. Paul
and Patricia
Churchland), Scientific American (January 1990),
25-37, and David Cole, "The
Chinese Room Argument" , Stanford
Enyclopedia of Philosophy
- Optional and Background
- Hubert
L. Dreyfus, What Computers Can't Do (Harper &
Row, 1972)
- Pamela McCorduck, Machines
Who Think (W.H.
Freeman, 1979)
- Marvin
Minsky, The Society of Mind (Simon and Schuster,
1986)
- Daniel Crevier, AI: The Tumultuous History of the
Search for Artificial Intelligence (Basic Books, 1993)
- Week VI (23 October)-Computers and the World of Work
- John Diebold, "Automation - The New Technology", Harvard
Business Review [hereafter HBR] 31,6(1953), 63-71
- James R. Bright, "How to Evaluate Automation", HBR
33,4(1955), 101-111
- Charles R. Walker, "Life in the Automatic Factory", HBR
36,1(1958), 111-119
- Shoshanna
Zuboff, In the Age of the Smart Machine (NY: Basic
Books, 1988), Chaps. 1 (pp. 19-24), 2, 4
- Optional and Background
- Douglas T. Ross, "Origins of the APT
language for automatically programmed tools", ACM SIGPLAN Notices 13,8(1978), 61-99 [pdf],
final version in History of
Programming Languages, ed. Richard Wexelblat (NY, 1978), 279-338
[pdf]
- David F. Noble, Forces of
Production: A Social History of Industrial Automation
- FALL BREAK
- Week VII (6 November) The World of the Programmer
- Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer,
Chap. 8
- Frederick P.
Brooks,
Jr., The
Mythical Man-Month [PU
online]
- One of the papers from the first two History of Programming
Languages Conferences, published in
- Richard L. Wexelblat, History
of Programming Languages
(New York: Academic Press, 1981) (FORTRAN, ALGOL, LISP, COBOL, APT,
JOVIAL, GPSS, Simula, JOSS, BASIC, PL/I, Snobol, APL)
- Thomas J.
Bergin, Jr. and Richard G.
Gibson, Jr., History of
Programming Languages II, (New York: ACM Press, 1996) (Algol 68,
Pascal, Monitors and Concurrent Pascal, Ada, Lisp, Prolog, Discrete
Event Simulation Languages, FORMAC, CLU, Smalltalk, Icon, Forth, C, C++)
- Both volumes are archived online in the ACM Digital Archives [link
(PU only)]; click through the link to the pertinent volume and thence
to the language of your choice.
- Optional and Background
- Gerald M. Weinberg, The Psychology of Computer
Programming (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, [1971])
- Philip Kraft, Programmers and Managers: The
Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States (New
York: Springer-Verlag, c1977)
- Week VIII (13 November) The World of Unix
- Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, Chap. 9
(review)
- Michael and Rhonda Hauben,
"On the Early
History and Impact of Unix: Tools to Build the Tools for a New
Millenium", in Netizens:
An Anthology, Chap. 9
- Michael S. Mahoney (ed.), "The
Unix Oral History Project: Release.0, The Beginning" (AT&T
Bell Laboratories, 1989); see the
people mentioned
- [Added 01/07/2006] As a final project, the members of the 1998
seminar
edited the transcripts of the interviews, wrote précis, and
collaborated on a joint
"Oral History of Unix"; all the material is at the link.
- Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson, "The Unix Time-Sharing
System", Communications
of the ACM 17,7 (1974), 365-375 [pdf]
(first published description)
- D.M. Ritchie, "Reflections on software research", Communications
of the ACM 27,8(1984), 758-60 [pdf]
- Ken Thompson, "Reflections on trusting trust",
ibid., 761-763 [pdf]
- Optional and Background
- Check out the two mains web pages for Multics, the one
maintained by the Multicians
and the other by MIT,
where you will find online copies of many of the seminal historical
sources. The MIT site has a link to recently posted source files
for the final Multics release 12.5.
- On the origins of time-sharing,
see John McCarthy's
Memorandum to P.M. Morse Proposing Time Sharing (1959) and his
Reminiscences on the History of Time Sharing
- Dennis M. Ritchie,
"The
Development of the C Language"
- Brian W. Kernighan and Peter
J. Plauger, The Elements of
Programming Style (NY:
McGraw-Hill, 1974; 2nd ed. 1978) and Software
Tools, (Reading, MA: Addison Wesley, 1976)
- Week IX (20 November) - A Man's
World?
- Sherry
Turkle, The Second Self:
Computers and the Human Spirit, Chap. 3 [ACLS
Humanities E-Book online]; this is a classic work and worth reading
in its entirety [start
of ebook]
- Michael S. Mahoney, "Boys'
Toys and Women's Work: Feminism Engages Software", in Angela N.H.
Creager,
et al. (eds.), Feminism in Twentieth Century Science, Technology
and
Medicine (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), Chap. 9 [E-reserves]
- IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
18,3
(Fall 1996) is dedicated to articles on women in computing; read the
following:
- W. Barkley Fritz, "The Women
of ENIAC", 13-28 [pdf]
- T. Estrin, "Women's studies and computer science:
their intersection", 43-46 [pdf]
Alison Adam, "Constructions of Gender in the History of Artificial
Intelligence", 47-53 [pdf]
- Optional and Background
- David Grier, When Computers
Were Human
- Week X (27 November) - The Social Life of Information
- Brown and Duguid, The Social
Life of Information
- Optional and Background
- Fernando Flores and Terry Winograd, Understanding
Computers and Cognition
- Rosalind Williams, Retooling:
A Historian Confronts Technological Change
- Week XI (4 December) Networking
Worlds
- Campbell-Kelly and Aspray, Computer, Chaps. 10,
11
- Abbate,
Inventing the Internet
- Optional and Background
- Ted Nelson, Computer Lib/Dream Machines
(Redmond, WA: Tempus Books of Microsoft Press, 1987; original edition,
1974)
- Paul Freiberger and Michael Swaine, Fire in the
Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer (Berkeley:
Osborne/McGraw-Hill, 1984)
- Susan Lammers, Programmers at Work (Redmond,
WA: Microsoft Press, 1986) [Interviews with many of the people
discussed
in this week's readings]
- James Chposky and Ted Leonsis, Blue Magic: The
People, Power and Politics Behind the IBM Personal Computer (NY:
Facts on File Publications, 1988)
- Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander, Fumbling the
Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal
Computer (NY: William Morrow & Co., 1988)
- Michael A. Cusumano and Richard W. Selby, Microsoft
Secrets: How the World's Most Powerful Software Company Creates
Technology, Shapes Markets, and Manages People
(NY: The Free
Press, 1995)
- Collection of online articles on the History of
the Internet
- See also Internet History
and WWW History: Internet Resources
- Harvard Information
Infrastructure Project
- Week XII (11 December) The World
of Cyberspace
-
- Lessig, Code, and Other
Laws of Cyberspace
- Optional and Background
- John K. Galbraith, The New
Industrial State
- Clifford Stoll, The
Cuckoo's Egg
- Langdon Winner, "Do Artifacts Have Politics?" Daedalus(Winter,
1980),
121-136 (online)
- Charles Petzold, Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and
Software