Syllabus

Images used in class

General

Virtual Museum of Computing. Part of the Virtual Library, with numerous links to other sites.

Comphist.org, with links to other history sites, museums, on-line resources.

Ed Thelen's antique computers page. An excellent source of links to online and physical museums, early computer sites, manufacturer sites, books, manuals, and documents, including the Aspray text that we'll use.

Computer Society timeline (pdf) and other resources

IEEE History Center

JAN Lee's History of Computing page.

Tim Bergin's computing museum (select "Museums" and then "Virtual museum tour")

Charles Babbage Institute for the history of computing.

History of computing bibliography

Computer History Museum

IFIP History timeline

Stanford University computer museum

University of Virginia computer museum

Columbia University computing history, with a good set of links to other sites.

History of Computing by Mark Greenia. Lots of good photos.

The History of Computing Foundation

Digibarn, with lots of photos

How computers work: pages by John Savard

Books and documents

Computing Before Computers, ed. William Aspray.

The Prehistory of the Digital Computer, from Relays to the Stored Program Concept, 1935-1945 by Paul E. Ceruzzi

many documents and links to more sites, from Ed Thelen's Web site

State of the Art, an illustrated history of the integrated circuit, by Stan Augarten (1983). A very nice introduction to ICs, from the early days of transistors to a 32-bit CPU.

First Draft Report on the Edvac (the "von Neumann report" on stored-program computing), and a paper, "The EDVAC as von Neumann Planned it", M. Godfrey and D. Hendry (IEEE Annals on the History of Computing 15:1 (1993) [scroll down the page to find these].

historic documents, from the first FORTRAN manual to the Ethernet patent and beyond.

Hardware components and computer design, an introduction to early computer hardware by Harry Huskey

Courses

A York University course on the history of computing

Tim Bergin's American University course (select "Teaching the history of computing", and then "Lectures")

History of computer graphics, from a course on the topic taught by Wayne Carlson at Ohio State. The course page has additional sources of information (see supplementary resources) among others.

A list of courses on the history of computing

19th century

Jacquard loom photo Another loom (Shelburn Museum, Burlington, VT). And another, photographed by Prof. Barr in Stockholm.

Charles Babbage biography and analytical engine documents.

Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, Allen Bromley (Annals of the History of Computing 4:3 (1982).

Brief biography of Ada Byron King, Countess of Lovelace

Mechanical calculators

History of mechanical calculators, with links to a number of documents. Redin's history is good, with numerous links; there is also a page on Japanese calculators. Another good site is Vintage Calculators.

Curta calculator page

Analog computing

Antikythera mechanism (Greek calendrical computer from ca. 70 BC): current research project, Another account with a Java animation.

Gunnery fire control computers from a Naval Ordnance document on surface fire control.

Electromechanical computers

Konrad Zuse's computers

Early electronic computing

Atanasoff archive, Iowa State. Photos of the ABC and replica

Colossus rebuild project

The enigma and bombes -- German coding machine and British code-cracking

ENIAC museum, and other historial links

The women of ENIAC (IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 18:3, pp 13-28)

photos of ENIAC, the Bell Labs Relay Computer, and many others, from the US Army Aberdeen Proving Grounds website.

disk storage page, with some images of historic computers

vacuum tubes and transistors: basic explanations from Wikipedia

the Williams tube CRT computer memory.

Unisys Newsletter, with articles on Univac systems among others.

Mark Smotherman's computer architecture history page.

NASA Computers in Spaceflight, James Tomayko

an interesting table from Datamation of 1960 computer prices and capabilities

Advertisements

photos of old computers and a collection of early computer advertisements from 1959-1979, both from DVQ, ("DVQ was founded in 1981 to pursue various bits of technology that its founders find interesting")

early advertisements and other documents from Digibarn

Personal computing

personal computing timelines, by Ken Polsson

Homebrew Computer Club (with two chapters from Steven Levy's Hackers).

Bill Gates' An open letter to hobbyists, on paying for software.

The Free Software Foundation

historical articles on Xerox PARC's early GUIs.

Time Magazine, Jan 3, 1983, Machine of the Year (1982) cover picture and article

Apple MacIntosh ad in Newsweek, and brochure, 1984

MacIntosh history, with interviews and original documents.

Augmenting human intellect

Vannevar Bush's "As we may think" 1945 Atlantic Monthly essay in which he introduces his idea of the "memex" personal assistant.

Two papers by J. R. Licklider, DARPA director: Man-computer symbiosis, The computer as a communication device (with R. Taylor). both (pdf files from a DEC Systems Res. Lab report)

Douglas Engelbart and William English, A research center for augmenting human intellect, on the use of a mouse and personal workstation (1968).

Engelbart's 1968 demo of the mouse, hypertext, dynamic file linking, and two-person interaction via a computer, later called "The Mother of All Demos" (RealVideo clips).

Ted Nelson and hypertext: Nelson's home page; Xanadu project; excerpts from Nelson's Computer Lib/Dream Machine, revised, 1977

Free Software Foundation definition of "free"

Internet and Web

Federal Networking Council definition of the Internet

Hobbes' Internet Timeline

Internet history -- sources

Technical history of the Internet (1999 ACM SIGCOMM tutorial by major players in Internet development)

Paul Otlet, Forefather of the Web? For more information, see a bibliography of writings on Paul Otlet.

Al Gore and the Internet, a message from Vinton Cerf and Robert Kahn, two of its developers.

Atlas of Cyberspaces. Many collections of maps: historical, conceptual, network topology,.... See also the parent site .

Internet RFC home page (requests for comments) and a list of all RFCs. Another list, humorous RFCs

Writing

Why you can't cite Wikipedia, by Neil L. Waters, Comm. of the ACM 50:9.

Union library links

The Elements of Style, William Strunk. A classic guide, also available in print, revised by E. B. White (4th ed, Longman, 2000).

Jack Lynch's page on resources for writers, with many links

Common Errors in English, by Paul Brians

advance vs advancement

David Hemmendinger ( hemmendd at nospam union.edu)

Last updated 30 March 2008