"Lars Nielsen insightfully and engagingly shows why we've got an unlikely partnership - the American military-industrial complex teamed with a generation of pot-smoking hippie whiz-kids - to thank for today's digital economy. This is one of the best books I've read all year."
- James Amato, President and CEO, Tekserve, Inc.
"Over the past seven decades, commerce has been dramatically redefined (and re-engineered) in step with the advance of digital technology. Lars Nielsen does a splendid job of revealing this vital evolution. I couldn't put the book down." – James Strock, author of SERVE TO LEAD
Noted systems developer Lars Nielsen reveals the dynamic combination of innovation, competition and (often eccentric) entrepreneurship that went to shape today's tech landscape.
From the military's ENIAC of 1946 to the ripening of the Web and e-commerce, Nielsen's COMPUTING: A BUSINESS HISTORY details the evolution of computing as it has impacted the models and practices of markets and professional services around the globe.
Nielsen explains not only the development of technologies, but the ongoing saga of strategic rivalries between such tech firms as IBM, Cisco, Apple, Microsoft, Google and Facebook.
He surveys the rise and fall of companies and platforms from the early days of the mainframe when the likes of Sperry Rand and DEC laid unsuccessful siege to IBM's market-share, through to the era of Windows vs. Mac and beyond.
And he vividly depicts the brilliant but often rapacious personalities behind the competition that shaped the business computing environment we know today.
CONTENTS
Preface
1: From Military to Marketplace
2: The Sixties - Hardware
3: The Sixties – Programming and Systems Engineering
4: Time-Sharing, Third Party Vendors, AntiTrust, PLATO, and the Rise of the Integrated Circuit
5: Hobbyists, Microsoft and DOS
6: The Woz and Steve Jobs
7: The Personal Computer Comes of Age
8: Macintosh
9: Bring on the Clones
10: Networks
11: AutoDesk, Adobe Systems and Other Success Stories
12: Internet
13: Web Commerce
14: The Future: Inter-Cloud, Etc.
15: About the Author
16: About the Publisher
