Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Before the Machine: Calculation and the Dream of Automation (Antiquity-1830s)

Before the Machine: Calculation and the Dream of Automation (Antiquity-1830s)

Geissler, Robert

Paperback

Series: The Computing Chronicles, Book 1

General ComputersGeneral World HistoryHistory & Philosophy of Science

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN13: 9798170869978
Publisher: Independently Published
Pages: 142
Weight: 0.44
Height: 0.30 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English

Before there were microchips, there was a bone with thirty notches carved by hand-and before there was software, there was a silk loom that could be programmed with a chain of punched cards.

Before the Machine is the story of humanity's four-thousand-year attempt to mechanize thought itself, long before anyone imagined a computer. Follow the Antikythera Mechanism-a two-thousand-year-old bronze device so advanced its true purpose wasn't understood until modern CT scanning revealed it. Meet Blaise Pascal, who built the first true mechanical calculator to save his tax-collector father from drowning in arithmetic. Watch Gottfried Leibniz work out the rules of binary math in 1703-two and a quarter centuries before anyone had a use for it. And witness the tragedy and vindication of Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, whose Analytical Engine described the architecture of a modern computer a hundred years before the technology existed to build one.

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