Author: Aristotelis Tympas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 9781848827417
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
This book offers an introduction to the history of computing during the ‘first’ (steam) and the ‘second’ (electricity) industrial revolution. It starts with the origins of the industrial revolution and stops at the emergence of electronic computing, which for many historians signifies the end of the industrial society and the beginning of a post-industrial society. It is popularly assumed that the history of computing before the second half of the twentieth century is unimportant. The general argument of the book is that computing has been of primary importance since the late nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth century. The book shows that the industrial revolution was made possible by a parallel revolution in computing technology. As indicated by the transition from isolated factory steam engines to vast networks of interconnected electric power lines, the industrial revolution was actually a permanent technological revolution. The book suggests that it was sustained by a perpetual revolution in computing technology. The history of this perpetual computing revolution helps us to understand that electronic era computing continued on what this permanent computing revolution had accumulated during the mechanical and the electrical age. What followed after the 1940s capitalized on what had started in the 1780s. In this sense, the book offers a history of computing during the mechanical and the electrical age that helps us to contextualize the history of electronic computing.

Author: Aristotle Tympas
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1848827423
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 253

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Book Description
Although it is popularly assumed that the history of computing before the second half of the 20th century was unimportant, in fact the Industrial Revolution was made possible and even sustained by a parallel revolution in computing technology. An examination and historiographical assessment of key developments helps to show how the era of modern electronic computing proceeded from a continual computing revolution that had arisen during the mechanical and the electrical ages. This unique volume introduces the history of computing during the “first” (steam) and “second” (electricity) segments of the Industrial Revolution, revealing how this history was pivotal to the emergence of electronic computing and what many historians see as signifying a shift to a post-industrial society. It delves into critical developments before the electronic era, focusing on those of the mechanical era (from the emergence of the steam engine to that of the electric power network) and the electrical era (from the emergence of the electric power network to that of electronic computing). In so doing, it provides due attention to the demarcations between—and associated classifications of—artifacts for calculation during these respective eras. In turn, it emphasizes the history of comparisons between these artifacts. Topics and Features: motivates exposition through a firm historiographical argument of important developments explores the history of the slide rule and its use in the context of electrification examines the roles of analyzers, graphs, and a whole range of computing artifacts hitherto placed under the allegedly inferior class of analog computers shows how the analog and the digital are really inseparable, with perceptions thereof depending on either a full or a restricted view of the computing process investigates socially situated comparisons of computing history, including the effects of a political economy of computing (one that takes into account cost and ownership of computing artifacts) assesses concealment of analog-machine labor through encasement (“black-boxing”) Historians of computing, as well as those of technology and science (especially, energy), will find this well-argued and presented history of calculation and computation in the mechanical and electrical eras an indispensable resource. The work is a natural textbook companion for history of computing courses, and will also appeal to the broader readership of curious computer scientists and engineers, as well as those who generally just have a yearn to learn the contextual background to the current digital age. "In this fascinating, original work, Tympas indispensably intertwines the histories of analog and digital computing, showing them to be inseparable from the evolution of social and economic conditions. " Prof. David Mindell, MIT

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic data processing
Languages : en
Pages : 836

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Book Description

Author: Paul Cockshott
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199640327
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Although we are entirely unaware of it, computation is central to all aspects of our existences. Every day we solve, or try to solve, a myriad of problems, from the utterly trivial to the bafflingly complex. This book explains why it is possible to do computation and what the ultimate limits of it are, as understood by modern science.

Author: Dennis Komm
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319427490
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 360

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Book Description
This textbook explains online computation in different settings, with particular emphasis on randomization and advice complexity. These settings are analyzed for various online problems such as the paging problem, the k-server problem, job shop scheduling, the knapsack problem, the bit guessing problem, and problems on graphs. This book is appropriate for undergraduate and graduate students of computer science, assuming a basic knowledge in algorithmics and discrete mathematics. Also researchers will find this a valuable reference for the recent field of advice complexity.

Author: Gualtiero Piccinini
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191633429
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Gualtiero Piccinini articulates and defends a mechanistic account of concrete, or physical, computation. A physical system is a computing system just in case it is a mechanism one of whose functions is to manipulate vehicles based solely on differences between different portions of the vehicles according to a rule defined over the vehicles. The Nature of Computation discusses previous accounts of computation and argues that the mechanistic account is better. Many kinds of computation are explicated, such as digital vs. analog, serial vs. parallel, neural network computation, program-controlled computation, and more. Piccinini argues that computation does not entail representation or information processing although information processing entails computation. Pancomputationalism, according to which every physical system is computational, is rejected. A modest version of the physical Church-Turing thesis, according to which any function that is physically computable is computable by Turing machines, is defended.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Electronic data processing
Languages : en
Pages : 868

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Book Description

Author: Daniela Dragoman
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 3642255728
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 261

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Book Description
This book presents the achievements in bionanoelectronics in a coherent manner. It deals with nanodevices applied to biostructures, molecular motors, molecular pumps, molecular nanoactuators and electronic biodevices, including nanodevices for sensing and imaging biomolcules. The book describes bionanoelectronics, detection of biomolecules and targets various biological applications such as detection and sequencing of DNA and early detection of various deseases and nanomedicine. Further important topics of the book are biomimetics and bioinspired electronics.The book also deals with biomolecules as building blocks of nanodevices for nanoelectronics or future computing architecture The application of scanning probe techniques to biological samples is described.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 454

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Book Description

Author: Julianne Nyhan
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319201700
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
This book addresses the application of computing to cultural heritage and the discipline of Digital Humanities that formed around it. Digital Humanities research is transforming how the Human record can be transmitted, shaped, understood, questioned and imagined and it has been ongoing for more than 70 years. However, we have no comprehensive histories of its research trajectory or its disciplinary development. The authors make a first contribution towards remedying this by uncovering, documenting, and analysing a number of the social, intellectual and creative processes that helped to shape this research from the 1950s until the present day. By taking an oral history approach, this book explores questions like, among others, researchers’ earliest memories of encountering computers and the factors that subsequently prompted them to use the computer in Humanities research. Computation and the Humanities will be an essential read for cultural and computing historians, digital humanists and those interested in developments like the digitisation of cultural heritage and artefacts. This book is open access under a CC BY-NC 2.5 license