I read this book for a class, Computers in Society. Some parts of the book were very interesting and others not so much. Once the book gets past the 1960s it converged very rapidly to talking about things I already knew, versus the earlier part of the book which was very new to me.#

One of the most interesting parts of the book is the discussion of business and information processing and management before the computer. The majority of my favourite quotes are from this section.#

The first section of the book is called, "When Computers Were People", and it talks about De Prony's novel invention of the "computation factory" for making nautical, and other, tables of numbers.#

De Prony organized his table-making "factory" into three sections. The first section consisted of half a dozen eminent mathematicians-including Adrien Legendre and Lazare Carnot-who decided on the mathematical formulas to be used in the calculations. Beneath them was another small section-a kind of middle management-that, given the mathematical formulas to be used, organized the computations and compiled the results ready for printing. Finally, the third and largest section, which consisted of sixty to eighty human computers, did the actual computation. The computers used the "method of differences," which required only the two basic operations of addition and subtraction, and not the more demanding operations of multiplication and division. Hence the computers were not, and did not need to be, educated beyond basic numeracy and literacy. In fact, most of them were hairdressers who had lost their jobs because "one of the most hated symbols of the ancient regime was the hairstyles of the aristocracy." [pg. 12]

I was surprised to learn that the main desire to use a typewriter versus handwriting documents was not that it was faster to write, but that it was faster to read...#

Prior to the development of the inexpensive reliable typewriter, one of the most common office occupations was that of a "writer" or "copyist." These were clerks who wrote out documents in longhand. There were many attempts at inventing typewriters in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, but none of them was commercially successful because none could overcome both of the critical problems of document preparation: the difficult of reading handwritten documents and the time it took a clerk to write them. In the nineteenth century virtually all business documents were handwritten, and the busy executive spent countless hours deciphering them. Hence the major attraction of the typewriter was that typewritten documents could be read effortlessly at several times the speed of handwritten ones. [pg. 30]

There was a funny quote from Charles Babbage about how the English government was not interested in his inventions. Compare this criticism of blogs.#

"Propose to an Englishman any principle, or any instrument, however admirable, and you will observe that the whole effort of the English mind is directed to find a difficult, a defect, or an impossibility in it. If you speak to him of a machine for peeling a potato, he will pronounce it impossible: if you peel a potato with it before his eyes, he will declare it useless, because it will not slice a pineapple." [pg. 58]

"It'll never work!" "It's not journalism so it's useless!"

There was also an interesting quote from an pioneer of the EDSAC computer about bugs.#

[...] Before people began to write real programs for real computers, it had always been assumed that there would be no particular difficult in getting programs to work. Consequently, there was a surprise in store for whichever group was the first to get a computer running. This of course was the Cambridge EDSAC, and the problems surfaced within a few weeks of the machine first operating. Wilkes later recalled:

By June 1949 people had begun to realize it was not so easy to get a program right as had at one time appeared. I well remember when this realization first came on me with full force. [...] I was trying to get working my first non-trivial program, which was one for the numerical integration of Airy's differential equations. It was on one of my journay's between the EDSAC room and the punching equipment that "hesitating at the angles of stairs" the realization came over me with full force that a good part of the remainder of my life was going to be spent in finding errors in my own programs.

At first mistakes in program were simply called mistakes, or errors. But within a few years they were called "bugs" and the process of correcting them was called "debugging." [pg. 185]

Something funny about FORTRAN...#

The first programmer's manual for FORTRAN, handsomely printed between glossy IBM covers, announced that FORTRAN would be available in October 1956, which turn out to be "a euphemism for April 1957"-the date on which the system was finally released. [pg. 189]

The book talked a little bit about one of the first industry conferences about software engineering. Very little has changed...#

Although there were some serious academic and industrial papers presented at the conference, the real importance of the meeting was to act as a kind of encounter group for senior figures in the world of software to trade war stories. One participant from MIT confessed: "We build systems like the Wright brothers built airplanes-build the whole thing, push it off the cliff, let it crash, and start over again." [pg. 201]