Authors: Lee Butcher.
Hardcover, 224 pages
Publisher: Paragon House
Publication Date: 1987-09
Edition: 1st

Authors: I. Bernard Cohen.
Hardcover, 412 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 1999-06-04


Reviews :

    Howard Hathaway Aiken (1900-1973) was a major figure of the early digital era. He is best known for his first machine, the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator or Harvard Mark I, conceived in 1937 and put into operation in 1944. But he also made significant contributions to the development of applications for the new machines and to the creation of a university curriculum for computer science.

This biography of Aiken, by a major historian of science who was also a colleague of Aiken's at Harvard, offers a clear and often entertaining introduction to Aiken and his times. Aiken's Mark I was the most intensely used of the early large-scale, general-purpose automatic digital computers, and it had a significant impact on the machines that followed. Aiken also proselytized for the computer among scientists, scholars, and businesspeople and explored novel applications in data processing, automatic billing, and production control. But his most lasting contribution may have been the students who received degrees under him and then took prominent positions in academia and industry. I. Bernard Cohen argues convincingly for Aiken's significance as a shaper of the computer world in which we now live....

    Great controversies never die. The brouhaha surrounding the unveiling of the IBM Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator (or Harvard Mark I), the first general-purpose automatic computer, is a perfect example: Who invented it, IBM engineers or Harvard applied mathematician Howard Aiken? Science historian I. Bernard Cohen knew Aiken and tells the whole story in Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer, both an engaging life story of a unique man and a tale of the rancorous struggle for recognition between strong personalities.

Through Cohen's painstaking research, including exhaustive looks into the archives of Harvard and IBM, interviews with Aiken and other principals, and his own reminiscences, the reader gets a glimpse into the partnership between business, academia, and the military, which, like it or not, propelled us headfirst into the Information Age. We catch a glimpse of how Aiken's self-described "laziness" in graduate school led him to dream of a machine that would ease the burden of complex calculations. From this passivity the development of the Mark I followed between 1937 and 1944, and the never-completely-resolved conflict over inventor's credit.

Cohen is a mild partisan on Aiken's behalf but argues convincingly that subsequent developments in our understanding of computer design moot or at least temper the problem--acknowledging that crucial contributions were made on both sides, he suggests that the problem never would have arisen today. --Rob Lightner...

Authors: Pascal Van Hentenryck. Laurent Michel. Yves Deville.
Paperback, 210 pages
Publisher: The MIT Press
Publication Date: 1997-04-18


Reviews :

    Many science and engineering applications require the user to find solutions to systems of nonlinear constraints or to optimize a nonlinear function subject to nonlinear constraints. The field of global optimization is the study of methods to find all solutions to systems of nonlinear constraints and all global optima to optimization problems. Numerica is modeling language for global optimization that makes it possible to state nonlinear problems in a form close to the statements traditionally found in textbooks and scientific papers. The constraint-solving algorithm of Numerica is based on a combination of traditional numerical methods such as interval and local methods, and constraint satisfaction techniques.

This comprehensive presentation of Numerica describes its design, functions, and implementation. It also discusses how to use Numerica effectively to solve practical problems and reports a number of experimental results.

A commercial implementation of Numerica is available from ILOG under the name ILOG Numerica....

Authors: M. Gordon Hunter.
Hardcover, 272 pages
Publisher: IGI Publishing
Publication Date: 2007-06-18


Reviews :

    Contemporary Chief Information Officers: Management Experiences explores the experiences of contemporary Chief Information Officers in the United States, Taiwan, and New Zealand, who agreed to participate and to be identified by name and company. The CIO role is now more of the management role but it still requires knowledge and leadership skills in the application of technology. The focus is now on employing technology to address business goals. Those who aspire be a CIO must know the expectations of the senior management team, the team needs to understand the role they play, and everyone must concur on how they will meet corporate objectives. In addition to providing valuable information about the role of the CIO, Contemporary Chief Information Officers: Management Experiences looks at interaction with other parts of the organization, as well as external relationships with vendors and suppliers. These insights have been provided by practicing CIOs. Their comments will prove valuable to both current CIOs and those who aspire to the role....

Authors: Jennifer Marks.
Perfect Paperback, 132 pages
Publisher: Crystal Dreams Publishing
Publication Date: 2006-12-15
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    One: Memoir of a Manic Addict brings my readers along with me on a wild ride through the funhouse mirror to experience the blissful horror of drugs, the odd beauty of insanity, a huge sad impossible love, the brutal truth of growing up, of pain and loss and finding the strength to make sense of the senseless and the faith to go on with the burden of living. I reflect upon the party life and the hip New York City drug scene, the distorted views and insane directions launched by an undiagnosed bipolar condition kept afloat with drugs, alcohol, food binges, sex, overspending, and an inability to touch land. As the reader looks on, I grab hold of my own life and Come to terms with who I really am when all the craziness is stripped away: I am every woman, just like my readers, just like you, a vulnerable human who got lost in darkness along the way and, by the grace of God, stumbled back into the light....

Authors: John A.n. Lee.
Hardcover, 816 pages
Publisher: Routledge
Publication Date: 1995-11-01
Edition: 1

Reviews :

    The International Biographical Dictionary of Computer Pioneers is more than a who's who in computer science and development. It presents biographies of 240 innovators in the field of computing, from Charles Babbage to Alan Turing, and Howard Aiken to John von Neumann, and explains their contribution to computer science. Computer Pioneers includes those who have played a supportive role such as enlightened managers, financiers, or teachers as well as those individuals central to the development of computing. Accompanying each biography is a bibliography in two parts: works by the entrant and works about the entrant. An appendix provides information on other sources of biography from standard reference books to oral history collections. The book ends with a comprehensive index....

Authors: James H. Austin.
Hardcover, 237 pages
Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr
Publication Date: 1978-02


Reviews :

    This first book by the author of Zen and the Brain examines the role of chance in the creative process. James Austin tells a personal story of the ways in which persistence, chance, and creativity interact in biomedical research; the conclusions he reaches shed light on the creative process in any field.

Austin shows how, in his own investigations, unpredictable events shaped the outcome of his research and brought about novel results. He then goes beyond this story of serendipity to propose a new classification of the varieties of chance, drawing on his own research and examples from the history of science—including the famous accidents that led Fleming to the discovery of penicillin. Finally, he explores the nature of the creative process, considering not only the environmental and neurophysiological correlates of creativity but also the role of intuition in both scientific discoveries and spiritual quests. This updated MIT Press paperback edition includes a new introduction and recent material on medical research, creativity, and spirituality....

Authors: Jim Clark.
Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Publication Date: 2000-07-16
Edition: 1st

Reviews :

    ...

    Sitting at your desk, not getting much done, you finally give in to the temptation and click onto www.coolwaytokilltime.com. Little do you know, as you check on the price of cattle futures in Bolivia, that you have Jim Clark to thank for this wonderful research tool and time waster. Clark didn't invent the Internet (that was the Pentagon, looking for an inscrutable way to transmit classified information--or Al Gore, if you can believe him) or even the World Wide Web (that was a Swiss researcher named Tim Berners-Lee). Nor did he invent the first Web browser with a graphical interface; that was a pair of University of Illinois computer geeks named Marc Andreessen and Eric Bina. What Clark did was team up with Andreessen to create Netscape, and their first product, Netscape Navigator, made the Net more universally accessible than it had ever been. It also made a lot of people really rich, a fact Clark dwells on in perhaps too much detail.

The story of Netscape alone is thrilling enough, but Clark also gives tremendous insight into the real way American business operates nowadays--the speed, the risks, and the hatred for rivals (lots of hatred, mostly for Microsoft and Bill Gates.) Most of the book covers the founding of Netscape Communications, but there's an epilogue, too, discussing the merger of Netscape with America Online, the ongoing battle with Microsoft, and, most important, the impact the Web has had on everyday life. Clark makes a sound argument that Netscape had a lot to do with that. Oh, and did you know it made him rich? --Lou Schuler...

Authors: Patricia Failing.
Hardcover, 136 pages
Publisher: Univ of Washington Pr
Publication Date: 1991-12

Authors: Casey Kait. Stephen Weiss.
Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Collins
Publication Date: 2001-06-01


Reviews :

    "In a forty-year business career we won't go through a period like we went through in the last five years."

-Kevin Ryan, CEO, DoubleClick

The commercial and cultural explosion of the digital age may have been born in California's Silicon Valley, but it reached its high point of riotous, chaotic exuberance in New York City from 1995 to 2000 -- in the golden age of Silicon Alley. In that short stretch of time a generation of talented, untested twentysomethings deluged the city, launching thousands of new Internet ventures and attracting billions of dollars in investment capital. Many of these young entrepreneurs were entranced by the infinite promise of the new media; others seemed more captivated by the promise of infinite profits. The innovations they launched -- from online advertising to 24-hour Webcasting -- propelled both the Internet and the tech-stock boom of the late '90s. And in doing so they sent the city around them into a maelstrom of brainstorming, code-writing, fundraising, drugs, sex, and frenzied hype…

until April 2000, when the NASDAQ zeppelin finally burst and fell at their feet.

In the pages of Digital Hustlers, Alley insiders Casey Kait and Stephen Weiss have captured the excitement and excesses of this remarkable moment in time. Weaving together the voices of more than fifty of the industry's leading characters, this extraordinary oral history offers a ground-zero look at the birth of a new medium. Here are entrepreneurs like Kevin O'Connor of DoubleClick, Fernando Espuelas of StarMedia, and Craig Kanarick of Razorfish; commentators like Omar Wasow of MSNBC and Jason McCabe Calacanis of the Silicon Alley Reporter; and inimitable Alley characters like party diva Courtney Pulitzer and Josh Harris, the clown prince of Pseudo.com. Together they describe a world of sweatshop programmers and paper millionaires, of cocktail-napkin business plans and billion-dollar IPOs, of spectacular successes and flame-outs alike.

Candid and open-eyed, bristling with energy and argument, Digital Hustlers is an unforgettable group portrait of a wildly creative culture caught in the headlights of achievement. ...