computers

• 
• SOURCE: New York Times
  4/4/2023
  

  Historian Chris Miller on the Amazing—and Dangerous—Semiconductor

  From surveillance to geopolitics, there are dangers alongside the benefits that ubiquitous semiconductor chips bring to contemporary life. Ezra Klein interviews Miller on his podcast to dig in. 

• 
• SOURCE: The Drift
  

  Silicon Valley Was and Is The Child of the Military-Industrial Complex

  by Jeannette Estruth

  "The technology sector attributes its economic power to its own creativity and rogue innovation, but throughout its history it has been dependent on the federal budget."

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  12/6/2022
  

  50 Years Later, Remembering Pong's Success

  Pong's develper and Atari cofounder Allan Alcorn: "I didn't think the company would last long because most startup companies didn't. And so I thought it would fail after a while, but it'd be a lot of fun."

• 
• SOURCE: Wired
  2/8/2022
  

  Women in Tech have been Pulling the Second Shift for Decades

  “The greatest trick that capitalism ever pulled was convincing the world that what women do in the home isn’t work,” says Joy Rankin, a historian of computing.

• 
• SOURCE: The Conversation
  10/11/2021
  

  Computer Space Launched the Video Game Industry 50 Years Ago. Why Haven't You Heard of It?

  by Noah Wardrip-Fruin

  The first effort at a commercial arcade video game didn't fail because it was too complicated. It couldn't deliver a quality game-playing experience because it relied on technology developed for television instead of the new, but expensive, processors for computers. 

• 
• SOURCE: Slate
  1/30/20
  

  The Three Civil Rights–Era Leaders Who Warned of Computers and Racism

  by Charlton McIlwain

  More than 50 years later, will the U.S.—and Silicon Valley—hear their message?

• 
• SOURCE: The Wilson Quarterly
  8-27-15
  

  The peculiar history of computers in the Soviet Union

  by Laura Kurek

  The story of why the Soviet Union first labeled the computer as a taboo invention, and later believed it would prove the superiority of the communist system.

• 
• SOURCE: NPR
  1-6-15
  

  Setting The Record Straight For Alan Turing

  by Adam Frank

  It's not just that Turing's work was worthy of a Nobel Prize. He went far beyond that.

• 
• SOURCE: JSTOR Daily
  10-20-14
  

  Sherlock Holmes star to feature in a new movie about Alan Turing

  The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch, is opening in wide release later this fall, bringing the tragic story of Alan Turing to the movies.

• SOURCE: Time Magazine
  4-30-13
  

  Computing Pioneer Harry Huskey Is Honored at 97

  On Saturday evening, I was a very happy attendee of the Computer History Museum’s Fellow Awards, an inspiring annual event which celebrates the contributions of individuals whose work has changed the course of computing history. Three people were honored this year: Ed Catmull, Harry Huskey and Bob Taylor.Ed Catmull, as I knew, started out as a computer graphics scientist, became one of the founders of Pixar and is now the president of both that extraordinary company and Walt Disney Feature Animation. I was also well aware that Bob Taylor headed up the research efforts at ARPA and Xerox PARC which produced the Internet, the modern graphical user interface, Ethernet, the laser printer and other utterly essential technologies.But Harry Huskey? I’d never heard of the man. Turns out that he did an awful lot — and, having been born in 1916, he did much of it in the very early days of the computing industry, even before the word “computer” came into use....

• 
• SOURCE: Special to HNN
  1-14-13
  

  Jim Cullen: Review of Andrew Piper's "Book Was There: Reading in Electronic Times" (Chicago, 2012)

  Jim Cullen, who teaches at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School in New York, is a book review editor at HNN. His new book, Sensing the Past: Hollywood Stars and Historical Visions, has just been published by Oxford University Press. Cullen blogs at American History Now.