Dear colleagues, Apologies that ACM Books messed up with initial pricing for the recently published Computing and the National Science Foundation, 1950-2016 by Peter Freeman, Rick Adrion, and Bill Aspray. ACM Books promised me to price its history titles at $40 softcover / $60 hardback — roughly in line with market rates. This correction now made on Amazon. Readers also may have access through a subscription model (something like JSTOR & Project Muse) through your local research/university library. https://www.amazon.com/Computing-National-Science-Foundation-1950-2016-ebook... <https://www.amazon.com/Computing-National-Science-Foundation-1950-2016-ebook/dp/B081TMBMNC/> The answer to :: which federal agency is the primary source of funding for fundamental research in computing and information technologies . . . . . ? NSF supported . . . the first widely-used web browser, Netscape; sponsored . . . algorithms at the core of the Google search engine; facilitated the growth of the public Internet; and funded research on the scientific basis for countless other applications and technologies. It’s a story that computing historians really need to know, and these authors make good use of their insider perspectives, access to documents, and dozens of new oral histories (deposited now at CBI) http://books.acm.org/titles#tab2022 <http://books.acm.org/titles#tab2022> ACM Books has half a dozen history titles in advanced stages of preparation. Please be looking for . . .
Code Nation: Personal Computing and the Learn to Program Movement in America by Michael Halvorson (with personal access to Microsoft activities (all too rare!) treatment of professional/applications programming == think MSDOS, Windows, C, Visual Basic)
Software: A Technical History by Kim Tracy with chapters on . . . operating systems . . . programming languages . . . programming environments/tools . . . networking . . . database management . . . and software futures
Emergence of Internetworking, 1968-1988 is a connected narrative by Jim Pelkey and Andy Russell based on 80 new/unpublished oral histories with industry pioneers and luminaries (interviews available at CHM)
Best wishes, Tom Misa ================================