出版社:Basic Books
出版日期:2001-10
ISBN:9780465042258
作者:Steve Lohr
页数:250页
作者简介
The remarkable story of the scientific revolution that made the new economy possible-software-told through the unsung heroes of programming and their achievements.
In the 1950s, just before John Backus's team developed the Fortran language that revolutionized the first generation of programming, it took dozens of full-time programmers and operators to run and debug each of the era's room-sized computers. Today, languages like HTML are simple enough that anyone who knows it can set up a personal Web page, using a laptop that has many times the power of those early giant computers.
In Go To, Steve Lohr chronicles the history of software from the early days of complex mathematical codes mastered by a few thousand to today's era of user-friendly software and over six million professional programmers worldwide. Lohr maps out the unique seductions of programming, and gives us an intimate portrait of the peculiar kind of genius that is drawn to this unique blend of art, science, and engineering.
We meet the movers and shakers of every era from the 1950s to the open-source movement of today-iconoclasts such as Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, the Bell Labs engineers whose Unix operating system and C programming language loosened the grip of IBM; Charles Simonyi, the father of Word, the most popular software application; and James Gosling, the creative force behind Java, the leading programming language for the Internet.With original reporting and deft storytelling, Steve Lohr shows us how software transformed the world, and what it holds in store for our future.
书籍目录
Acknowledgments1 Introduction The Rise of Software and the Programming Art2 FORTRAN: The Early "Turning Point"3 The Hard Lessons of the Sixties: From Exuberance to the Realities of COBOL and the IBM 360 Project4 Breaking Big Iron's Grip Unix and C5 Programming for the Millions: The BASIC Story from Dartmouth toVisual Basic6 The European Influence: From Algol to Pascal to C++7 A Computer of My Own: The Beginning of the PC Industry and the Story of Word8 Computing for the Masses: The Long Road to "Gooey" and the Macintosh9 Programming for Everyman Just Let the Users Do It10 Java: The Messy Birth of a New Language11 There Has To Be a BetterWay: Apache and the Open Source MovementAfterwordNotesReferencesIndex
内容概要
STEVE LOHR is senior writer and technology correspondent for the New Fork Times, and is co-author of U.S. vs. Microsoft. He lives is New York City