"At the end of the nineteenth century, many laypeople had a "working knowledge not only of electricity, but also of the buttons they pushed and the relationship between the two," according to Plotnick. Those who promoted electricity and sold electrical devices, however, wanted push-button interfaces to be "simplistic and worry-free.""
Imagine people promoting websites and apps not wanting "laypersons" to have working knowledge of computers and computer networks.
Imagine them artificially separating all people using computers into two categories: "developers" and "users".
"They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action."
This set of blog posts that turned into a book is a great history of the underlying technologies that ultimately led to the computer, from the discovery of electricity onward. It's not a complete history of science, as it focuses on just one area, but it really brings out the nature of the interaction of discovery and practical development within their social context. I found it fascinating and enlightening.
I've seen the demonstration and I go there all the time. I LOVE computer history, it's our legacy, we're standing on the shoulders of the real pioneers. Those people who had to start from punch cards and mainframe terminals... they're the ones who really knew how to program.
What's crazy is it's so unknown to the general populace. Kids learn about George Washington and Bill Gates the businessman who gave us Windows, but they have no clue who Ken and Dennis are. Punch cards are meaningless to them. They wouldn't know an old hard disk from a vinyl record box. But one day they will. One day people will realize that this was the beginning of humanity. The real beginning. The PDP-11, the 1400 series, the ENIAC.
If you haven't been to the computer history museum, go!
I'm sorry this isn't what you asked for but it made me think of this clip [0] from a documentary about Benoit Mandelbrot- he worked at IBM Research for 35 years [1].
I just love the quote: "It was 1958- the giant American corporation was pioneering a technology that would soon revolutionize the way we all live: The Computer. IBM was looking for creative thinkers; non-conformists; even rebels... people like Benoit Mandelbrot".
This is a pretty easy question to answer ... here are the links to history articles that I thought enough of to bookmark (note that a few are NOT computer/tech related) - https://pinboard.in/u:smoyer/t:history.
For the other side of this, read "ENIAC: The Triumphs & Tragedies of the World's First Computer" by Scott McCartney. The work Eckert and Mauchly put in to get the first electronic, general purpose computer in a state that it was useful to others should be interesting to anyone who reads HN. It's both a story of hackers and entrepreneurs.
I take issue with this characterization: "Mauchly was not a better scientist than Atanasoff, but he was a more ambitious entrepreneur."
Mauchly did something Atanasoff did not: he made something useful. So useful, in fact, every digital computer you see in front of you is a direct descendant of Mauchly's labor, not Atanasoff. Eckert and Mauchly drew inspiration and ideas from many places, but I think people here should be able to sympathize with the fact that these two were the leaders behind the project that made those ideas a useful technology that changed the world. While those ideas existed before Eckert and Mauchly did their work, they're the ones who put in the grunt work to fully realize them - and contribute their own innovations along the way.
I actually find the portrayal of Eckert and Mauchly in the whole piece real disheartening.
> It jumps from a 1940 idea of GUI to Mother of all demos
I think there wasn’t much to show until interactive computing became feasible. The idea of pairing a person and a computer (or time-sharing a computer between multiple users) and provide graphical or direct manipulation interfaces wasn’t there for a long time. IIRC the Linc provided a small CRT that could be controlled by software and kind of beget the PDP-1.
This is a great story, but most of the anecdotes are very familiar to someone who has studied (or was there for) the early era of home computing in the West. The Altair, the Heathkit, etc. Bill Gates' infamous Open Letter To Hobbyists was written in that era:
Imagine people promoting websites and apps not wanting "laypersons" to have working knowledge of computers and computer networks.
Imagine them artificially separating all people using computers into two categories: "developers" and "users".
"They thought the world needed less thinking though and tinkering, and more automatic action."
https://www.ibm.com/ibm/history/ibm100/us/en/icons/think_cul...
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