Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing - Softcover

Denning, P. J.; Metcalfe, R.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0387949321 ISBN 13: 9780387949321

Publisher: Copernicus, 1997

Synopsis

In March 1997, the Association for Computing Machinery will celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the electronic computer. To understand what an extraordinary fifty years the computer has had, you need only look around you--probably no farther than your desk. Computers are everywhere: in our cars, our homes, our supermarkets, at the phone company office, and at your local hospital. But as the contributors to this volume make clear, the scientific, social and economic impact of computers is only beginning to be felt. These sixteen invited essays on the future of computing take on a dazzling variety of topics, with opinions from such experts as Gordon Bell, Sherry Turkle, Edsger W. Dijkstra, Paul Abraham, Donald Norman, Franz Alt, and David Gelernter. This brilliantly eclectic collection, commissioned to celebrate a major milestone in an ongoing technological revolution, will fascinate anybody with an interest in computers and where they're taking us.

About this title

About the Author

Robert Metcalfe is the inventor of the Ethernet technology and founder of the 3Com corporation. He is currently vice-president, technology at IDG and executive correspondent for Infoworld, where he writes a column that reaches over 500,000 readers worldwide. He holds a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard.

Peter J. Denning is associate dean for computing and chair of the Computer Science Department in the School of Information Technology and Engineering at George Mason University. He was formerly the founding director of the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science at the NASA Ames Research Center, and the president of the Association for Computing Machinery 1980-82.

Review

...a compelling book...what sets the book apart from the general run of technology-future books is the authority of its contributors and the tone of restraint that pervades it, when compared with the genre's usual ludicrous extrapolations. -- Nature, November 6, 1997

Beyond Calculation was produced at the behest of the Association for Computing Machinery, the largest international scientific and educational computer society in the world. Founded in 1947, a year after the first successful electronic digital computer (ENIAC) was unveiled, ACM knows enough about computing's past to make credible speculations about its future. For this book, ACM (www.acm.org) asked two dozen of its top talents, the cream of computer science, to speculate on what's around the next 50 years of the exponential curve. In general, Beyond Calculation provides a sober assessment of three aspects of computing: the purely technical (still taking off), the social and cultural (dawning in our consciousness) and the commercial (which has reached out to embrace the academic). The editors, ACM Publications Co-Chairmen Peter Denning and Ethernet inventor and InfoWorld columnist Bob Metcalfe, elicited some diverse and thoughtful essays. Not all of them hit the mark, and a few are self-serving, but taken together they represent an imaginative attempt to show where computer science is heading. -- Upside, Cliff Barney

Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing...offers a collection of 24 essays of astonishing intellectual reach. -- Stephen Manes, The New York Times March 11, 1997

Edition details

• Publisher: Copernicus
• Publication date: 1997
• ISBN 10: 0387949321
• ISBN 13: 9780387949321
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 313