When Computers Went to Sea

2003-04-16
 |  Computers
When Computers Went to Sea

Author: David L. Boslaugh

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

ISBN: 0471472204

Category: Computers

Page: 492

View: 515

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When Computers Went to Sea explores the history of the United States Navy's secret development of code-breaking computers and their adaptation to solve a critical fleet radar data handling problem in the Navy's first seaborne digital computer system - that went to sea in 1962. This is the only book written on the United States Navy's initial application of shipboard digital computers to naval warfare. Considered one of the most successful projects ever undertaken by the US Navy, the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) was the subject of numerous studies attempting to pinpoint the reason for the systems inordinate success in the face of seemingly impossible technical challenges and stiff resistance from some in the military. The system's success precipitated a digital revolution in naval warfare systems. Dave Boslaugh details the innovations developed by the NTDS project managers including: project management techniques, modular digital hardware for ship systems, top-down modular computer programming techniques, innovative computer program documentation, and other novel real-time computer system concepts. Automated military systems users and developers, real-time process control systems designers, automated system project managers, and digital technology history students will find this account of a United States military organization's initial foray into computerization interesting and thought provoking.

Digital State

2013-10-01
 |  Technology & Engineering
Digital State

Author: Thomas J. Misa

Publisher: U of Minnesota Press

ISBN: 9780816688364

Category: Technology & Engineering

Page: 320

View: 624

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Accounts of the early events of the computing industry—the Turing machine, the massive Colossus, the ENIAC computer—are well-told tales, and equally well known is the later emergence of Silicon Valley and the rise of the personal computer. Yet there is an extraordinary untold middle history—with deep roots in Minnesota. From the end of World War II through the 1970s, Minnesota was home to the first computing-centered industrial district in the world. Drawing on rare archival documents, photographs, and a wealth of oral histories, Digital State unveils the remarkable story of computer development in the heartland after World War II. These decades found corporations—concentrated in large part in Minnesota—designing state-of-the-art mainframe technologies, revolutionizing new methods of magnetic data storage, and, for the first time, truly integrating software and hardware into valuable products for the American government and public. Minnesota-based companies such as Engineering Research Associates, Univac, Control Data, Cray Research, Honeywell, and IBM Rochester were major international players and together formed an unrivaled epicenter advancing digital technologies. These companies not only brought vibrant economic growth to Minnesota, they nurtured the state’s present-day medical device and software industries and possibly even tomorrow’s nanotechnology. Thomas J. Misa’s groundbreaking history shows how Minnesota recognized and embraced the coming information age through its leading-edge companies, its workforce, and its prominent institutions. Digital State reveals the inner workings of the birth of the digital age in Minnesota and what we can learn from this era of sustained innovation.

Grace Hopper

2012-11-10
 |  History
Grace Hopper

Author: Kathleen Williams

Publisher: Naval Institute Press

ISBN: 9781612512655

Category: History

Page: 280

View: 135

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When grace Hooper retired as a rear admiral from the U.S. Navy in 1986, she was the first woman restricted line officer to reach flag rank and, at the age of seventy-nine, the oldest serving officer in the Navy. A mathematician by training who became a computer scientist, the eccentric and outspoken Hoper helped propel the Navy into the computer age. She also was a superb publicist for the Navy, appearing frequently on radio and television and quoted regularly in newspapers and magazines. Yet in spite of all the attention she received, until now "Amazing Grace," as she was called, has never been the subject of a full biography. Kathleen Broome Williams looks at Hooper's entire naval career, from the time she joined the Waves and was sent in 1943 to work on the Mark 1 computer at Harvard, where she became one of the country's first computer programmers. Thanks to this early Navy introduction to computing, the author explains, Hooper had a distinguished civilian career in commercial computing after the war, gaining fame for her part in the creation of COBOL. The admiral's Navy days were far from over, however, and Williams tells how Hopper--already past retirement age--was recalled to active duty at the Pentagon in 1967 to standardize computer-programming languages for Navy computers. Her temporary appointment lasted for nineteen years while she standardized COBOL for the entire department of defense. Based on extensive interviews with colleague and family and on archival material never before examined, this biography not only illuminates Hopper's pioneering accomplishments in a field that came to be dominated by men, but provides a fascinating overview of computing from its beginnings inWorld War II to the late 1980s.

Hard Charger!

2005-07
 |  Biography & Autobiography
Hard Charger!

Author: James A. Treadway

Publisher: iUniverse

ISBN: 9780595360093

Category: Biography & Autobiography

Page: 324

View: 589

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All who served in the military have a story to tell. The story could be about a person, platoon, division, squadron, or ship. it could be about a war, a battle, or everyday experiences. Hard Charger! is the story of a Cold War cruiser, The USS Biddle (DLG-34), The last Navy cruiser powered by conventional steam, The last of the single-ended guided missile frigates, The last ship of her class, but the first on the front lines.Biddle's story is traced from when her combat systems were conceived soon after the end of World War II and then designed and built during the 50's and 60's, To her construction, commission, shakedown, combat assignments in Vietnam, her battle at PIRAZ, overhauls, upgrades, training exercises and cruises To The North Atlantic and Mediterranean, and finally her decommissioning.The story is told by the officers and men who served aboard her - captains and deckhands, technicians and engineering officers, chiefs petty officers, plankowners and her decommissioning crew. Though Biddle is gone, her remarkable story remains, As does the freedom she helped protect.Historians, those currently involved with Navy combat systems, and those who served aboard a similar ship or during the Cold War will find Biddle's story interesting and thought provoking. Hard Charger! is the only book written about Biddle or any Belknap class cruiser.

History of Acquisition in the Department of Defense, Volume 1

2012-06-12
 |  Business & Economics
History of Acquisition in the Department of Defense, Volume 1

Author: Elliott V. Converse

Publisher: Office of the Secretary, Historical Offi

ISBN: SRLF:A0004160321

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 788

View: 890

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This volume is a history of the acquisition of major weapon systems by the United States armed forces from 1945 to 1960, the decade and a half that spanned the Truman and Eisenhower administrations following World War II. These instruments of warfare—aircraft, armored vehicles, artillery, guided missiles, naval vessels, and supporting electronic systems—when combined with nuclear warheads, gave the postwar American military unprecedented deterrent and striking power.1 They were also enormously expensive. The volume is organized chronologically, with individual chapters addressing the roles of OSD, the Army, Navy, and Air Force in two distinct periods. The first, roughly coinciding with President Truman’s tenure, covers the years from the end of World War II through the end of the Korean War in 1953. The second spans the two terms of the Eisenhower presidency from 1953 through early 1961. The year 1953 marked a natural breakpoint between the two periods. The Korean War had ended. President Eisenhower and his defense team began implementing the “New Look,” a policy and strategy based on nuclear weapons, which they believed would provide security and make it possible to reduce military spending. The New Look’s stress on nuclear weapons, along with the deployment of the first operational guided missiles and the rapid advances subsequently made in nuclear and missile technology, profoundly influenced acquisition in the services throughout the 1950s and the remainder of the century. As used in this study, the term “acquisition” encompasses the activities by which the United States obtains weapons and other equipment. In surveying the history of acquisition between 1945 and 1960, this study discusses or refers in passing to many of the hundreds of weapon system programs initiated by the services in that period, but it is not a weapons encyclopedia. Instead, it investigates a few major programs in depth in the belief that such detailed examination best reveals the evolution of acquisition policies, organizations, and processes, and the various forces influencing weapons programs.

Computers and Commerce

2005
 |  Computers
Computers and Commerce

Author: Arthur Lawrence Norberg

Publisher: MIT Press

ISBN: 026214090X

Category: Computers

Page: 347

View: 975

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"Both ERA and EMCC had their roots in World War II, and in postwar years both firms received major funding from the United States government. Norberg analyzes the interaction between the two companies and the government and examines the impact of this institutional context on technological innovation. He looks at the two firms' operations after 1951 as independent subsidiaries of Remington Rand, and documents the management problems that began after Remington Rand merged with Sperry Gyroscope to form Sperry Rand in 1955"--Jacket.

The Digital Hand, Vol 3

2007-11-06
 |  Business & Economics
The Digital Hand, Vol 3

Author: James W. Cortada

Publisher: Oxford University Press

ISBN: 9780190290177

Category: Business & Economics

Page: 496

View: 446

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In The third volume of The Digital Hand, James W. Cortada completes his sweeping survey of the effect of computers on American industry, turning finally to the public sector, and examining how computers have fundamentally changed the nature of work in government and education. This book goes far beyond generalizations about the Information Age to the specifics of how industries have functioned, now function, and will function in the years to come. Cortada combines detailed analysis with narrative history to provide a broad overview of computings and telecommunications role in the entire public sector, including federal, state, and local governments, and in K-12 and higher education. Beginning in 1950, when commercial applications of digital technology began to appear, Cortada examines the unique ways different public sector industries adopted new technologies, showcasing the manner in which their innovative applications influenced other industries, as well as the U.S. economy as a whole. He builds on the surveys presented in the first volume of the series, which examined sixteen manufacturing, process, transportation, wholesale and retail industries, and the second volume, which examined over a dozen financial, telecommunications, media, and entertainment industries. With this third volume, The Digital Hand trilogy is complete, and forms the most comprehensive and rigorously researched history of computing in business since 1950, providing a detailed picture of what the infrastructure of the Information Age really looks like and how we got there. Managers, historians, economists, and those working in the public sector will appreciate Cortada's analysis of digital technology's many roles and future possibilities.

HCI Remixed

2007-12-21
 |  Computers
HCI Remixed

Author: Thomas Erickson

Publisher: MIT Press

ISBN: 9780262292641

Category: Computers

Page: 360

View: 320

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Personal and reflective essays that describe how particular works—whether papers, books, or demos, from classics to forgotten gems—have influenced each writer's approach to HCI. Over almost three decades, the field of human-computer interaction (HCI) has produced a rich and varied literature. Although the focus of attention today is naturally on new work, older contributions that played a role in shaping the trajectory and character of the field have much to tell us. The contributors to HCI Remixed were asked to reflect on a single work at least ten years old that influenced their approach to HCI. The result is this collection of fifty-one short, engaging, and idiosyncratic essays, reflections on a range of works in a variety of forms that chart the emergence of a new field. An article, a demo, a book: any of these can solve a problem, demonstrate the usefulness of a new method, or prompt a shift in perspective. HCI Remixed offers us glimpses of how this comes about. The contributors consider such HCI classics as Sutherland's Sketchpad, Englebart's demo of NLS, and Fitts on Fitts' Law—and such forgotten gems as Pulfer's NRC Music Machine, and Galloway and Rabinowitz's Hole in Space. Others reflect on works somewhere in between classic and forgotten—Kidd's “The Marks Are on the Knowledge Worker,” King Beach's “Becoming a Bartender,” and others. Some contributors turn to works in neighboring disciplines—Henry Dreyfuss's book on industrial design, for example—and some range farther afield, to Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis and Jane Jacobs's The Death and Life of Great American Cities. Taken together, the essays offer an accessible, lively, and engaging introduction to HCI research that reflects the diversity of the field's beginnings.

The Government Machine

2003-09-26
 |  Computers
The Government Machine

Author: Jon Agar

Publisher: MIT Press

ISBN: 9780262292900

Category: Computers

Page: 564

View: 183

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An examination of technology and politics in the evolution of the British "government machine." In The Government Machine, Jon Agar traces the mechanization of government work in the United Kingdom from the nineteenth to the early twenty-first century. He argues that this transformation has been tied to the rise of "expert movements," groups whose authority has rested on their expertise. The deployment of machines was an attempt to gain control over state action—a revolutionary move. Agar shows how mechanization followed the popular depiction of government as machine-like, with British civil servants cast as components of a general purpose "government machine"; indeed, he argues that today's general purpose computer is the apotheosis of the civil servant. Over the course of two centuries, government has become the major repository and user of information; the Civil Service itself can be seen as an information-processing entity. Agar argues that the changing capacities of government have depended on the implementation of new technologies, and that the adoption of new technologies has depended on a vision of government and a fundamental model of organization. Thus, to study the history of technology is to study the state, and vice versa.

Warship 2016

2016-05-19
 |  History
Warship 2016

Author: Stephen Dent

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

ISBN: 9781844864386

Category: History

Page: 208

View: 162

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Warship 2016 is devoted to the design, development and service history of the world's combat ships. Featuring a broad range of articles from a select panel of distinguished international contributors, this latest volume combines original research, new book reviews, warship notes, an image gallery and much more to maintain the impressive standards of scholarship and research from the field of warship history. This 38th edition features the usual range of diverse articles spanning the subject by an international array of expert authors.

The Eye for Innovation

2005-01-01
 |  Medical
The Eye for Innovation

Author: Robert M. Price

Publisher: Yale University Press

ISBN: 9780300130553

Category: Medical

Page: 352

View: 598

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Serf-era and provincial Russia heralded the spectacular turn in cultural history that began in the 1860s. Examining the role of arts and artists in society's value system, Richard Stites explores this dramatic shift in a groundbreaking history of visual and performing arts in the last decades of serfdom. Provincial town and manor house engaged the culture of Moscow and St. Petersburg while thousands of serfs and exserfs created or performed. Against this background, Mikhail Glinka raised Russian music to new levels and Anton Rubinstein struggled to found a conservatory. Long before the itinerants, painters explored town and country in genre scenes of everyday life. Serf actors on loan from their masters brought naturalistic acting from provincial theatres to the imperial stages. Drawing on extensive archival research, Stites's richly detailed book re-visualises the culture of a flamboyant era and offers new perspectives on the origins of Russia's nineteenth-century artistic prowess.