The Golden Age of Computer Technology: Through the Eyes of an Aging Geek - Softcover

Zelkowitz, Marvin

Softcover

ISBN 13: 9798616600516

Verlag: Independently published, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

As computers become smarter and more autonomous, the underlying technology is becoming more obscure. Push “On” and the machine starts. Missing is an understanding of what the machine does before the desktop opens and login screen appears. How does the machine actually work? We continue to make the same mistakes repeatedly. Each new generation of hardware and software repeats the errors of the previous generation. Solutions to programing issues I remember from the late 1960s still occur in new software today. My smartphone, a device that was beyond the imagination of the writers of “Star Trek” in the 1960s is only a year old and already obsolete. Yet it frequently updates versions of many applications sometimes daily. We still can’t write programs that work reliably. The field doesn’t seem to have as much fun as it used to. Computer Science is now a mature industry. Some of the chaos and enjoyment of programming and running these earlier machines is gone. This book is an autobiographical journey of my 50 years with computers starting in 1962 where I instill in the reader what it was like to be an early generation computer scientist. While not part of the original generation of computer technicians, such as Grace Hopper, John Backus, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and numerous others from the 1950s, I am part of the generation that saw and participated in the emergence of the computer as the dominant technology in everyday life. As more of us from the 1960s and 1970s retire, it is important to chronicle the technology of the latter part of the twentieth century. In this book I show how the technology has evolved and how the academic world reacted to it. Why did certain things happen the way that they did? What have we done right and what we have done wrong?

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Independently published
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2020
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 13: 9798616600516
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 322
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar