A New History of Modern Computing (History of Computing)

How the computer became universal.

Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific supertool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people, to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music and movies, communicate, and count their steps. In A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace these changes. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new.

Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smart phones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing.

Thomas Haigh is Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Comenius Visiting Professor at the University of Siegen, and the coauthor of ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer (MIT Press). Paul E. Ceruzzi is Curator Emeritus at the Smithsonian Institution's National Air and Space Museum and the author of Internet Alley: High Technology in Tysons Corner,1945–2005, Computing: A Concise History (both published by the MIT Press), and other books.