November 2013
Intermediate to advanced
496 pages
13h 28m
English
Content preview from The Technical and Social History of Software EngineeringBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 1. Prelude: Computing from Ancient Times to the Modern Era
The human need to compute probably originated in prehistory when humans began to accumulate physical possessions. It soon became desirable to keep track of how many specific possessions (e.g., cattle) were owned by a family or tribe. Once simple addition and subtraction became possible, a related need was to record the information so it could be kept for long time periods and could be shared with others. Early recording devices were pebbles or physical objects, but it was eventually found that these could be replaced with symbols.
As humans evolved and began to settle in communities, other calculating needs arose, such as measuring the dimensions of bricks or marking off fields. ...
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