The Computer: An Illustrated History From its Origins to the Present Day

Great overview on computer history !... This book is definitely not the ultimate reference for computer history in terms of tech details, but it is an awesome compilation of images that meet the purpose to get you over the progress of technology... The pictures are where the real value is of the book, and even thought the little detail in terms of historical facts (and maybe even some imprecisions) this piece is a valuable add to any vintage computer enthusiast collection.

Great fun. The story is always interesting; the photos enjoyable. No more need be said. I give it 4 stars.

My Dad is THE biggest computer geek, and he loved this book! He actually owned a lot of the computers featured in here at one time or another. Would highly recommend for that nerd in you life!

ok, kind of boring , doesn't get going till the latter chapters , once computers became smaller and memory became bigger.

Informative and easy to read. I like the history of computers but there's not many books on this. Wish there was more.

Bought this for a gift. Came very quickly

This book was featured in a bookstore a couple of weeks agoso I picked it up to have a look.Three minutes was enough. In that time I saw two errors anddidn't think it was worth further attention.Those two errors were: p. 103 "Every IBM 701 came with a copy of the Fortran Compiler and ..." Not only is this statement false but Fortran was never implemented on the 701 which was both too small (memory) and lacked hardware floating point arithmetic. Fortran was introduced on the 701's successor machine the IBM 704 which remedied both these deficiences. p. 138 "Visicalc, the first computer spreadsheet ..." is also false. The first computer spreadsheet that I had any experience with was BACAIC (yes, it's pronounced like "backache") which stood for Boeing Aircraft Co. Algebraic Interpretive Computer. This was on the IBM 701 in the middle to late 1950s. Later the Naval Electronics Laboratory produced an Open Source spreadsheet program written in Fortran which made it less machine dependent but since the numerical analysis underlying its algorithms was based on the 36 bit word format of the IBM 700/7000 systems its portability was still limited. As far as I know, Visicalc was the first commercially available spreadsheet program for personal computers.Historical Note: I believe that the first commercially produced personalcomputer belonged to Prof. Harry Huskey of U. C. Berkeley who received itas a fee for designing it. It was a Bendix G15 and looked like an oversizedgreen refrigerator.In case it is helpful in evaluating the review, I was a 701 programmer beginningin 1956.

In our modern world, the presence of computers is everywhere and the rate of progress in the technology is blindingly fast. It is with a book like this that one can take a quick look at the amazing amount of progress in computing technology.The book itself is mainly an illustrative look at computers rather than one information-heavy. The pictures and photographs that fill this book make it a pleasure just to thumb through. The whole history of computers is shown, starting in the beginning days with large, analog calculators and then into digital technology to our modern world of laptops and iPhones. How computers are used is also shown from applications in areas such as science, military, entertainment, and communications.This book seems to be targeted for the very casual reader and does not offer much hard information. It makes a great coffee table book.In conclusion, this is a beautifully illustrated look at the history of computers for the average reader.

I have been searching for a good book outlining the development of the computer but will have to go on looking. This book has a lot of very good illustrations and thankfully gives its story largely from a UK aspect; rightly as the UK was the world leader in computer technology for much of the early years. However, it lacks sufficient information about the technology that distinguished the early machines from those of today.I have lived through much of the time in which the modern computer developed. The first I saw was a machine in the Clarendon Laboratory that could add two numbers together electronically. The first programming manual I read was for the ACE and DEUCE machines. Frauenfelder makes no mention of the DEUCE, an important machine in the development of the technology. In fact there is no mention of a great number of machines that, in my view, played a key role: the LEO (Lyons Electronic Office), the first machine developed solely for commercial use; The ubiquitous IBM 1401, the workhorse the mid-1960's; The eccentric IBM 7090 series that really made IBM the market leader, Introduced in this Country at a computer bureau in Newman Street in London. Previously, we had to go to Paris to work on the machine. There was the superior Univac 1107 and later 1108 machines as well as the CDC machine with its multiple processors.On the desktop computer front there was no mention of the huge range of machines that existed at the time of the introduction of the IBM PC which I saw as a backward step from the superior machines such as those of Epson and Apricot. The Wang desktop had a hardwired interpreted Basic operating system which was sufficiently fast to run communication software. I used this to install a network in the late 1970's, years before IBM desktops could do it.In summary it is an entertaining book but far from being a definitive history of computing.

Il libro è bello e ha delle bellissime foto.Tuttavia, la quantità di testo è modesta e se uno è appassionato di retrocomputing non dice nulla di eclatante.Adatto quindi ad un pubblico medio, non a veri appassionati di informatica