The Untold Story of Everything Digital: Bright Boys, Revisited

by Tom Green

Overview

The Untold Story of Everything Digital: Bright Boys, Revisited celebrates the 70th anniversary (1949-2019) of the world "going digital" for the very first time—real-time digital computing’s genesis story.

That genesis story is taken from the 2010 edition of Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology, 1938-1958, and substantially expanded upon for this special, anniversary edition.

Please join us for the incredible adventure that is The Untold Story of Everything Digital, when a band of misfit engineers, led by MIT's Jay Forrester and Bob Everett, birthed the digital revolution. The bright boys were the first to imagine an electronic landscape of computing machines and digital networks, and the first to blaze its high-tech trails.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780367220075
Publisher:	CRC Press
Publication date:	09/18/2019
Series:	AK Peters/CRC Recreational Mathematics Series
Edition description:	2nd ed.
Pages:	208
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Tom Green, journalist, writer and video producer, has been reporting on and producing programming about technology for over two decades.

Green is the founder (2017), publisher and editor in chief of Asian Robotics Review. Previously, 2012-2016, he launched and was founding editor in chief of Robotics Business Review (a property of EH Publishing). Green was also on-air host and lead researcher (2013-2016) for Robotics Business Review’s webcast programs, as well as lead editor and contributing author for Robotics Business Review’s annual series of robotics research reports.

Green has spoken at national and international robotics events and conferences; has been the subject of interviews on robotics with Barron’s, The Wall Street Journal, Swissquote, and CNN Money, among others; and also serves as a consultant and adviser on robotics from startups to multi-national corporations.

Formerly, as a TV writer/producer at Boston’s ABC affiliate WCVB-TV, Channel 5, he wrote and produced the news program Lifelines; and was lead writer on weekly sitcom Park Street Under. His work has been twice nominated for Emmy Awards.

His stage plays were produced at Boston’s Next Move Theatre and then reproduced as radio plays for National Public Radio. Green’s In the Room the Women Come and Go won a UNICO national short story award.

Green owned and operated his own video production company for ten years where he produced video for corporations, broadcast, and cable TV.

He is the author of the Amazon best seller Bright Boys: The Making of Information Technology (Taylor & Francis, 2010).

Green’s newest book, The Untold Story of Everything Digital, Bright Boys, Revisited, published by Taylor & Francis (London) goes on sale October 2019.

Web address for The Untold Story of Everything Digital

http://www.brightboysmedia.com/untold-story.html

Table of Contents

Foreword by Jay W. Forrester. Introduction: If the Barta Building Could Speak. 1. Terror at the Pentagon Taxi Stand. 2. Jay's Dilemma. 3. The Whistle Factory. 4. The Buildout. 5. 1949. 6. Island in the Stream. 7. Into the Great Wide Open. 8. Voices in the Machine.

Editorial Reviews

"For those studying the complexities of technological change, this volume plus Bright Boys forms a foundation for understanding how our ensnarled ‘system of digital systems’ was created, nurtured, then exploded worldwide. Must be examined by any serious student of the history of technology."

—Dik Daso, Author of Hap Arnold and the Evolution of American Airpower, and Doolittle: Aerospace Visionary

"Informed and informative, The Untold Story of Everything Digital: Bright Boys, Revisited is a unique and extraordinary history and one that unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library collections"

—John Burroughs, Midwest Book Review

"For those studying the complexities of technological change, this volume plus Bright Boys forms a foundation for understanding how our ensnarled ‘system of digital systems’ was created, nurtured, then exploded worldwide. Must be examined by any serious student of the history of technology."
—Dik Daso, Author of Hap Arnold and the Evolution of American Airpower, and Doolittle: Aerospace Visionary

"Informed and informative, The Untold Story of Everything Digital: Bright Boys, Revisited is a unique and extraordinary history and one that unreservedly recommended for both community and academic library collections"
—John Burroughs, Midwest Book Review

"This book tells the story of the first few years of modern computing in the USA. The 180 pages give a detailed account of the many different people and organisations working with computing from 1949 up until around 1955.

The book opens with a clear introduction to different aspects of the situation in the USA. On the one hand a group of pioneering "computer scientists" (a term we have only created subsequently) who are at the cutting edge of developing and building computers, and on the other hand the realisation by the US military of the need for quick analysis of vast amounts of data (principally the need to analyse radar data from thousands of low-level radar stations to be able to intercept a potential low-level bombing raid from Russian planes).

There are many aspects of these early days of computing that I knew nothing about, and this book has taught me many fascinating things."
—The Mathematical Gazette

From the Publisher