Beyond Calculation: The Next Fifty Years of Computing

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.

A prodigious effort encompassing 20 lengthy essays, this work attempts to illuminate the future by asking computer professionals and academics how computing and computers will change over the next 50 years. The varied responses come under such titles as "Growing Up in the Culture of Simulation" and "Why It's Good That Computers Don't Work Like the Brain." A typical passage reads: "[The Internet] has grown from an idea motivated by the need to interconnect heterogeneous packet-communication networks to our present-day ubiquitous communication web joining people, businesses, [and] institutions, through various forms of electronic equipment in a common framework." The essays are of course speculative, almost in a free-for-all way, and the conclusions, once unearthed from layers of scholarly expatiation, are something less than astonishing. Marginally recommended for academic libraries.?Robert C. Ballou, Atlanta
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.