Halvorson covers some familiar terrain in the rise of personal-computing programming in the 1960-70s — lots on BASIC, counterculture, software engineering — but also entirely new material on FORTRAN, Logo, MS Visual Basic, MS-DOS, MS Windows, Mac applications, “C” — commercial and application program development. Michael worked at Microsoft Press for years, and attends to the many varied publications from personal computing. Background for learn-to-program movement today!
Check out the many color illustrations: pretty much a first for the history titles from ACM Books.
In months to come, look for these ACM Books history titles going into production — Dick van Lente on Prophets of Computing: Visions of Society Transformed by Computing. . . Kim Tracy on software history . . . Jim Pelkey and Andy Russell on early networking industry . . . .