Cliff Stoll’s “The Cuckoo’s Egg” was on the best seller list in 1989 for more than four months. It chronicles the story of his pursuit of a German computer spy. A systems manager at Lawrence Berkeley Labs, he’d detected anomalies in his network, discovering an apparently authorized user was using…
When Neuromancer by William Gibson was first published it created a sensation. Or perhaps it would be more precise to say that it was used to create a sensation, for Bruce Sterling and other Gibson associates declared that a new kind of science fiction had appeared which rendered merely ordinary…
From Time Magazine, 1982: By The Millions, It Is Beeping Its Way Into Offices, Schools And Homes By Otto Friedrich. Reported by Michael Mortiz,San Francisco, J. Madeleine Nash,Chicago and Peter Stoler,New York WILL SOMEONE PLEASE TELL ME, the bright red advertisement asks in mock irritation, WHAT A PERSONAL COMPUTER CAN…
Byte was a hugely influential computer magazine that begain in 1975 and was published throughout the 1980s. It covered development in the entire field of software and computers, was published monthly, and sold for a yearly subscription of $10. The first issue was printed in September 1975, and featured ads…
Computer engineer Paul Baran of BBN (Bolt,Beranek,Newman) writes a paper, “On Distributed Communication Networks”, describing what later becomes known as packet switching, in which digital data are sent over a distributed network in small units and reassembled into a whole message at the receiving end. Packet switching will be an…
Written by the mathematician Alan Turing and published in 1936, this paper demonstrates that there are problems to which no mechanically computable solution exists by detailing the design of a theoretical digital computer. German mathematician David Hilbert theorized in 1928 that all math problems could be solved and that a…