Showing titles in History

A concise history of GPS, from its military origins to its commercial applications and ubiquity in everyday life.   

The Revolution of Money delves into the captivating journey of money's evolution, a narrative that unravels the intricate relationship between technology, history, and society at large. This book explores the pivotal role money plays as the backbone of our society's most significant challenges and opportunities. Two thousand years ago, humans used a wide variety of materials as money. Today, 90% of our money exists as digital computer entries. How did we arrive at this current system? And what may happen to money in the future?

Dan Schiller, who has conducted archival research on United States telecommunications for more than forty years, recovers the extraordinary social history of the major network systems of the United States. Drawing on arrays of archival documents and secondary sources, Schiller reveals that this history has been shaped by sharp social and political conflict and is embedded in the larger history of an expansionary United States political economy.

Walkley Award-winning journalist Tracey Spicer exposes the next frontier of feminism through the lens of artificial intelligence. Man-Made aims to open readers’ eyes to a transformative technological shift in society and give them the tools to make positive change. Winner, 2023 Australian...

This program is read by the author. An insider's account of Apple's creative process during the golden years of Steve Jobs. Hundreds of millions of people use Apple products every day; several thousand work on Apple's campus in Cupertino, California; but only a handful sit at the drawing board...

“Riveting...A great read, full of colorful characters and outrageous confrontations back when the west was still wild.” —George R.R. Martin A propulsive and panoramic history of one of the most dramatic stories never told—the greatest railroad war of all time, fought by the daring...

Eighteen billion Wi-Fi devices are in use around the world, with four billion more added every year. Connecting everyone to everything, it is central to our lives today. How did this happen? Beyond Everywhere is the surprising story in its entirety: the techno/political conflicts at its birth, the battles against competing technologies as it was being nurtured, and the international diplomatic intrigue as it spread across the planet. This vivid narrative about the people who gave Wi-Fi to the world is told with humor, insight, and charm by one of Wi-Fi's key developers.

An authoritative but readable examination of the digital sector in both the UK and US, Towards a Digital Renaissance traces the excitement and optimism of the early internet, the outsider cyberpunk ethic and open access. But it also monitors the more complex but ultimately more commercialised online world of today, a world dominated by corporate business in which many feel that surveillance has become overwhelming.

In 221 BCE, the Qin state conquered its neighbours and created the first unified Chinese empire in history. So began the imperial era, where dynasties claiming divine assent ruled for more than 2000 years. Borders shifted, and emperors struggled to exert control over every region of their territories. Elites held that they were inheritors of a rich, pre-imperial culture, while their society produced world-changing inventions such as the compass, printing, gunpowder and the gun. Imperial China itself was altered as it came into contact with others through trade, exploration and war.

In The Trail of Gold and Silver, historian Duane A. Smith details Colorado's mining saga - a story that stretches from the beginning of the gold and silver mining rush in the mid-19th century into the 21st century. Gold and silver mining laid the foundation for Colorado's economy, and 1859 marked the beginning of a fever for these precious metals.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, a diverse group of teachers and students working together on academic computing systems conducted many of the activities we now recognize as personal and social computing. Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto.

Boolean algebra, also called Boolean logic, is at the heart of the electronic circuitry in everything we use - from our computers and cars, to our kitchen gadgets and home appliances. How did a system of mathematics established in the Victorian era become the basis for such incredible technological achievements a century later?

From one of our most acclaimed novelists, a David-and-Goliath biography for the digital age. One night in the late 1930s, in a bar on the Illinois–Iowa border, John Vincent Atanasoff, a professor of physics at Iowa State University, after a frustrating day performing tedious mathematical...

The Big Ratchet is the story of the ratchets: the technologies and innovations, big and small, that propelled our species from hunters and gatherers on the savannahs of Africa to shoppers in the aisles of the supermarket. Our species long lived on the edge of starvation. Now we produce enough food for all 7 billion of us to eat nearly 3,000 calories every day. This is such an astonishing thing in the history of life as to verge on the miraculous. The Big Ratchet is the story of how it happened.

Are you fascinated with the Titanic? Have you wondered what it must have been like to work in those hot boiler rooms, or as a maid to a first class passenger? What about what it would have been like to actually be a first class passenger?

Once we step on the treadmill of progress, it's hard to step off. Yet Edward Tenner shows that human ingenuity can be applied in self-preservation as well, and he sheds light on the ways in which the users of commonplace technology surprise designers and engineers, as when early typists developed the touch method still employed on today's keyboards. And he offers concrete advice for reaping benefits from the devices that we no longer seem able to live without. Although dependent on these objects, we can also use them to liberate ourselves.

What if the information that powers modern life were wiped out tomorrow? Across history, breakthroughs have appeared, flourished—and vanished. The Egyptians could remove cataracts 4,000 years ago; entire libraries of irreplaceable data have burned in a night. Today, our hyper-connected, fully digital world may be even more fragile than the empires that came before us.

When John Campbell was hired in 1996, Michael Dell’s company was already a hyper-efficient technology upstart. By the time he left Dell in 2017, Michael’s little Texas-based catalog computer company had grown from 5,000 to 138,000 employees and evolved into one of the largest technology providers on the planet!

Hacker culture can be esoteric, but this entertaining reference is here to help. Written by a longtime hacker, this fun reference introduces you to key people and companies, fundamental ideas, and milestone films, games, and magazines in the annals of hacking. From phreaking to deepfakes, and from APT (advanced package tool) to zombie malware, grasping the terminology is crucial to understanding hacker culture and history.

As all aspects of our social and informational lives increasingly migrate online, the line between what is "real" and what is digitally fabricated grows ever thinne rand that fake content has undeniable real-world consequences. A History of Fake Things on the Internet takes the long view of how advances in technology brought us to the point where faked texts, images, and video content are nearly indistinguishable from what is authentic or true.