Early Programming Books

[Fred Cisin]

On Sun, 20 Jun 2021, Bill Degnan via cctech wrote:
> Paul,
> I have been compiling a library of such. Ioks here, if you are traveling
> north swing by to review the books on hand.  The one that comes to mind is
> Thinking Machunrs by Berkeley but here on the patio at my parents house I
> dont know the date.  Harvard press put out some early computing books but
> they may be Mark 1-specific.  Remind me and I can check when I get to the
> office.
> Bill
> Kennettclasic.com

1949  Edmund Berkeley  "Giant Brains, Or Machines That Think"


It wasn't until Jim Warren that that phrase got corrected to "machine WHO 
think", as isn't thinking the measure of which pronoun to use?


It seems to me that there were a few basic genres:
books that were references for a specific machine or language (often the 
"standards" were loose enough that it would be a specific implementation 
of a language on a specific machine)
and
books about theory and principles of computing,
and
books that purported to be about theory and principles, but that were 
closely tied to a specific machine or language

--
Grumpy Ol' Fred     		cisin at xenosoft.com