The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti PDF Author: Meryle Secrest
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0451493656
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
The human, business, design, engineering, cold war, and tech story of how the Olivetti company's first desktop computer, the P101, came to be. Within eighteen months it had caught up with, and surpassed, IBM, the American giant that had become an arm of the American government. Secrest tells how Olivetti made inroads into the US market in 1959 by taking control of Underwood of Hartford CT as an assembly plant for Olivetti's own typewriters and future miniaturized personal computers. Within a week of the purchase, the US government filed an antitrust suit to try to stop it. In 1960 Adriano Olivetti died suddenly of a heart attack; eighteen months later the young engineer who had assembled Olivetti's team of electronic engineers was killed in a suspicious car crash. The Olivetti company and the P101 came to an insidious and shocking end. -- adapted from jacket

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti PDF Author: Meryle Secrest
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0451493656
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Get Book Here

Book Description
The human, business, design, engineering, cold war, and tech story of how the Olivetti company's first desktop computer, the P101, came to be. Within eighteen months it had caught up with, and surpassed, IBM, the American giant that had become an arm of the American government. Secrest tells how Olivetti made inroads into the US market in 1959 by taking control of Underwood of Hartford CT as an assembly plant for Olivetti's own typewriters and future miniaturized personal computers. Within a week of the purchase, the US government filed an antitrust suit to try to stop it. In 1960 Adriano Olivetti died suddenly of a heart attack; eighteen months later the young engineer who had assembled Olivetti's team of electronic engineers was killed in a suspicious car crash. The Olivetti company and the P101 came to an insidious and shocking end. -- adapted from jacket

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti

The Mysterious Affair at Olivetti PDF Author: Meryle Secrest
Publisher: Knopf
ISBN: 0451493664
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
The never-before-told true account of the design and development of the first desktop computer by the world's most famous high-styled typewriter company, more than a decade before the arrival of the Osborne 1, the Apple 1, the first Intel microprocessor, and IBM's PC5150. The human, business, design, engineering, cold war, and tech story of how the Olivetti company came to be, how it survived two world wars and brought a ravaged Italy back to life, how after it mastered the typewriter business with the famous "Olivetti touch," it entered the new, fierce electronics race; how its first desktop compter, the P101, came to be; how, within eighteen months, it had caught up with, and surpassed, IBM, the American giant that by then had become an arm of the American government, developing advanced weapon systems; Olivetti putting its own mainframe computer on the market with its desktop prototype, selling 40,000 units, including to NASA for its lunar landings. How Olivetti made inroads into the US market by taking control of Underwood of Hartford CT as an assembly plant for Olivetti's own typewriters and future miniaturized personal computers; how a week after Olivetti purchased Underwood, the US government filed an antitrust suit to try to stop it; how Adriano Olivetti, the legendary idealist, socialist, visionary, heir to the company founded by his father, built the company into a fantastical dynasty--factories, offices, satellite buildings spread over more than fifty acres--while on a train headed for Switzerland in 1960 for supposed meetings and then to Hartford, never arrived, dying suddenly of a heart attack at fifty-eight . . . how eighteen months later, his brilliant young engineer, who had assembled Olivetti's superb team of electronic engineers, was killed, as well, in a suspicious car crash, and how the Olivetti company and the P101 came to its insidious and shocking end.

They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears

They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears PDF Author: Johannes Anyuru
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781949641080
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This daring speculative novel tackles terrorism and anti-immigrant hysteria, combining lyric intensity with the tools of science fiction.

Murder in E Minor

Murder in E Minor PDF Author: Robert Goldsborough
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1453266046
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
Iconic sleuth Nero Wolfe returns to track down the murderer of a New York Symphony Orchestra conductor in this Nero Award–winning mystery. Ever since disgraced associate Orrie Cather’s suicide, armchair detective Nero Wolfe has relished retirement in his Manhattan brownstone on West Thirty-Fifth Street. Two years after Cather’s death, only a visit from Maria Radovich—and the urging of Wolfe’s prize assistant, Archie Goodwin—could draw the eccentric and reclusive genius back into business. Maria’s uncle, New York Symphony Orchestra conductor Milan Stevens, formerly known as Milos Stefanovic, spent his youth alongside Wolfe as a fellow freedom fighter in the mountains of Montenegro. And now that the maestro has been receiving death threats, Wolfe can’t turn his back on the compatriot who once saved his life. Though her uncle has dismissed the menacing letters, Maria fears they’re more than the work of a harmless crank. But before Wolfe can attack the case, Stevens is murdered. The accused is the orchestra’s lead violinist, whose intimate relationship with Maria hit more than a few sour notes in her uncle’s professional circle. But Wolfe knows that when it comes to murder, nothing is so simple—especially when there are so many suspects, from newspaper critics and ex-lovers to an assortment of shady musicians. Now, in this award-winning novel that carries on the great tradition of Rex Stout, the irascible and immovable Nero Wolfe is back in the game, listening for clues and ready to go to war to find a killer. Murder in E Minor is the 48th book in the Nero Wolfe Mysteries, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator

Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator PDF Author: Keith Houston
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393882152
Category : Technology & Engineering
Languages : en
Pages : 283

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Book Description
The hidden history of the pocket calculator—a device that ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, and went with us to the moon—and the mathematicians, designers, and inventors who brought it to life. Starting with hands, abacus, and slide rule, humans have always reached for tools to simplify math. Pocket-sized calculators ushered in modern mathematics, helped build the atomic bomb, took us to the bottom of the ocean, and accompanied us to the moon. The pocket calculator changed our world, until it was supplanted by more modern devices that, in a cruel twist of irony, it helped to create. The calculator is dead; long live the calculator. In this witty mathematic and social history, Keith Houston transports readers from the nascent economies of the ancient world to World War II, where a Jewish engineer calculated for his life at Buchenwald, and into the technological arms race that led to the first affordable electronic pocket calculators. At every turn, Houston is a scholarly, affable guide to this global history of invention. Empire of the Sum will appeal to math lovers, history buffs, and anyone seeking to understand our trajectory to the computer age.

Inherent Vice

Inherent Vice PDF Author: Thomas Pynchon
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101594675
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 385

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Book Description
"The funniest book Pynchon has written." — Rolling Stone "Entertainment of a high order." - Time Part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon—private eye Doc Sportello surfaces, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era. In this lively yarn, Thomas Pynchon, working in an unaccustomed genre that is at once exciting and accessible, provides a classic illustration of the principle that if you can remember the sixties, you weren't there. It's been a while since Doc Sportello has seen his ex- girlfriend. Suddenly she shows up with a story about a plot to kidnap a billionaire land developer whom she just happens to be in love with. It's the tail end of the psychedelic sixties in L.A., and Doc knows that "love" is another of those words going around at the moment, like "trip" or "groovy," except that this one usually leads to trouble. Undeniably one of the most influential writers at work today, Pynchon has penned another unforgettable book.

Stephen Sondheim

Stephen Sondheim PDF Author: Meryle Secrest
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307946851
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 482

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Book Description
In the first full-scale life of the most important composer-lyricist at work in musical theatre today, Meryle Secrest, the biographer of Frank Lloyd Wright and Leonard Bernstein, draws on her extended conversations with Stephen Sondheim as well as on her interviews with his friends, family, collaborators, and lovers to bring us not only the artist--as a master of modernist compositional style--but also the private man. Beginning with his early childhood on New York's prosperous Upper West Side, Secrest describes how Sondheim was taught to play the piano by his father, a successful dress manufacturer and amateur musician. She writes about Sondheim's early ambition to become a concert pianist, about the effect on him of his parents' divorce when he was ten, about his years in military and private schools. She writes about his feelings of loneliness and abandonment, about the refuge he found in the home of Oscar and Dorothy Hammerstein, and his determination to become just like Oscar. Secrest describes the years when Sondheim was struggling to gain a foothold in the theatre, his attempts at scriptwriting (in his early twenties in Rome on the set of Beat the Devil with Bogart and Huston, and later in Hollywood as a co-writer with George Oppenheimer for the TV series Topper), living the Hollywood life. Here is Sondheim's ascent to the peaks of the Broadway musical, from his chance meeting with play- wright Arthur Laurents, which led to his first success-- as co-lyricist with Leonard Bernstein on West Side Story--to his collaboration with Laurents on Gypsy, to his first full Broadway score, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. And Secrest writes about his first big success as composer, lyricist, writer in the 1960s with Company, an innovative and sophisticated musical that examined marriage à la mode. It was the start of an almost-twenty-year collaboration with producer and director Hal Prince that resulted in such shows as Follies, Pacific Overtures, Sweeney Todd, and A Little Night Music. We see Sondheim at work with composers, producers, directors, co-writers, actors, the greats of his time and ours, among them Leonard Bernstein, Ethel Merman, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein, Jerome Robbins, Zero Mostel, Bernadette Peters, and Lee Remick (with whom it was said he was in love, and she with him), as Secrest vividly re-creates the energy, the passion, the despair, the excitement, the genius, that went into the making of show after Sondheim show. A biography that is sure to become the standard work on Sondheim's life and art.

The Periodic Table

The Periodic Table PDF Author: Primo Levi
Publisher: Everyman's Library
ISBN: 0679444637
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 279

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Book Description
The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew. It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student and young chemist at the inception of the Second World War, and of his investigations into the nature of the material world. As such, it provides crucial links and backgrounds, both personal and intellectual, in the tremendous project of remembrance that is Levi’s gift to posterity. But far from being a prologue to his experience of the Holocaust, Levi’s masterpiece represents his most impassioned response to the events that engulfed him. The Periodic Table celebrates the pleasures of love and friendship and the search for meaning, and stands as a monument to those things in us that are capable of resisting and enduring in the face of tyranny.

Crime

Crime PDF Author: Ferdinand von Schirach
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307595536
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 161

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Book Description
From Ferdinand von Schirach, one of Germany’s most prominent defense attorneys, comes a jolting debut collection of short stories that daringly brings to light the motivations stirring within the criminal mind. By turns witty and sorrowful, unflinchingly brutal and heartbreaking, the deeply affecting, quietly unnerving cases presented in Crime urge a closer examination of guilt and innocence. In “Fähner,” a small-town physician and avid gardener betrays little emotion when he takes an ax to his wife’s head, an act that shocks the locals but provides a long-awaited reprieve for the good doctor. Abbas, a Palestinian refugee who is cornered into a life of crime, finds true love and seemingly a saving grace with a beautiful student named Stefanie in “Summertime.” But when she is viciously murdered in a hotel room after having been paid to sleep with one of the country’s wealthiest men, is Abbas to blame or is it the man who seems to have it all? And in the startling story “Love,” a young man’s infatuation with his girlfriend takes a grisly turn as he comes to grips with his unconventional—and uncontrollable—impulses to truly know a woman. “Guilt,” writes von Schirach, “always presents a bit of a problem.” In this beautifully nuanced and telling collection, guilt is indeed never as clear-cut as the crime, and justice is more nebulous still.

The Big Book of Reel Murders

The Big Book of Reel Murders PDF Author: Otto Penzler
Publisher: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard
ISBN: 052556389X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 1202

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Book Description
Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology rolls out the red carpet for the stories that Hollywood is made of. A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original. Lights! Camera! Action! The latest book in the Big Book series takes us behind the curtain to uncover the stories that became some of the greatest films of the silver screen. There's the W. Somerset Maugham short story that inspired Hitchcock's Secret Agent; Robert Louis Stevenson's horrifying tale that was later turned into the iconic movie The Body Snatcher, starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff; Sir Ian Fleming's "From a View to a Kill," later one of Roger Moore's greatest Bond films; and "Cyclists' Raid," the short story that formed the basis for the legendary Brando film The Wild One. Otto Penzler delivers the director's cut on these classic short stories and the films they gave rise to. So grab your Sno-Caps and a jumbo box of popcorn and curl up with these cinematic tales from the likes of Agatha Christie, Dennis Lehane, Joyce Carol Oates, Dashiell Hammett, O. Henry, Edgar Allan Poe, and Arthur Conan Doyle.