6 Apr
2005
6 Apr
'05
9:49 p.m.
On Thu, 7 Apr 2005, Tony Duell wrote:
Agreed. A lot of the books of history seem to attempt
to rewrite said
history :-). Most of the books I have are _now_ on classic computers, but
were on currnet machines when they were written.
metoo -- with a few exceptions if I'm interested in something
computational and old I read original materials -- they're
inaccurate and biased enough as it is. Stuff like the Cerruzzi
book, or Goldstine, well, they're full of shit. Cerruzzi
especially just parrots axe-grinders like Goldstine.
For 'history', I've got 'Automatic
Digital Computers' by M. V. Wilkes,
which I will not sell at _any_ price (well, it's autographed, OK...).
Wilkes name!?! Yow... I have a 2nd ed of that book (paid $9 for),
it's ex-library, somewhat ratty, it's a great book in many ways,
and shows the pretty high level of software sophistication in
1950. (runtime linking loaders). 1st ed's now got for $1500!
My hands-down favorite book, MIT PRESS, out of print, is A HISTORY
OF COMPUTING IN THE 20TH CENTURY, 1980. A collection of papers by
the first-gen crowd, just wonderful.
Brian Randall is one of the few computer historians who I trust to
get it right. He personally got a lot of the Bletchley/Turing junk
declassified, if I remember right. Maybe Jules knows more about
this stuff.