[SIGCIS-Members] Roundup of classic computer journalism

[Thomas Haigh]

Hello,

Last week Slate featured "The Longform Guide to Early Computing." This is a
feature they run at weekends to round up classic writing on a particular
topic.

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/longform/2012/03/steve_jobs_and_the
_new_ipad_the_greatest_stories_ever_written_about_the_early_computer_industr
y_.single.html

The subtitle of "the greatest stories ever written about the first
computers" made me smile, as the earliest writing is from 1972 (predictably,
Stuart Brand's Rolling Stone article on Spacewar). So no danger of combat
between fans of Atanasoff and Zuse. They also miscredit Gary Wolf's Wired
article on Xanadu to 1985, which was almost a decade before Wired launched.
Still, all the articles are worth reading and might be assigned for classes
dealing with the personal computer era.

If you have any favorites they missed, you might want to share them with the
list. My suggestions:

Steven Levy's classic "A Spreadsheet Way of Knowledge" (1984)
https://files.nyu.edu/ap70/public/levyss.htm

Langdon Winner's Mythinformation - an abridged version is at
http://www.eco-action.org/dt/mythin.html 


Tom