28 Feb
1998
28 Feb
'98
9:28 a.m.
At 13:19 2/28/98 -0800, you wrote:
BTW, [Computer: A History] is a good read. It starts
with the requisite
story of
Babbage and goes into the computers that sprang out of
the war effort
(EDVAC, EDSAC, etc) then goes into the Univac story, launches into the IBM
story and carries on for several chapters, then starts winding down with
the microcomputer revolution. Strangely enough they give a couple
sentences of mention to HP. Some of the information that is presented in
this book is suspect, and some is plain wrong. A minor annoyance to an
otherwise decent tome.
It's also riddled with typos, and if anybody knows that, I do. BasicBooks
sent me galleys for comments; I told them the copyediting was horrible, sat
down, spent four or five solid days debugging the book, and e-mailed them
the patches. They acknowledged receipt and thanked me profusely. When I
got my production copy of the book, all but a handful of the typos and
misstatements I had fixed were still there.
__________________________________________
Kip Crosby engine(a)chac.org
http://www.chac.org/index.html
Computer History Association of California