Computer, 4th Edition

Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003263272-1

IN JANUARY 1983, Time magazine selected the personal computer as its “Man of the Year,” and public fascination with the computer has continued to grow ever since. That year was not, however, the beginning of the computer age. Nor was it even the first time that Time had featured a computer on its cover. Thirty-three years earlier, in January 1950, the cover had sported an anthropomorphized image of a computer wearing a navy captain’s hat to draw readers’ attention to the feature story, about a calculator built at Harvard University for the US Navy. Sixty years before that, in August 1890, another popular American magazine, Scientific American, devoted its cover to a montage of the equipment constituting ...