Between Human And Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics (Johns Hopkins Studies in the History of Technology)

Rating:
Summary: Very valuable contribution to the history of computing
Review: Professor Mindell has rendered a great service to the history of computing through painstaking original research that supports this well-written book. He examines how civilian mathematicians, engineers, and scientists worked on the practical problem of improving the effectiveness of anti-air-craft fire during World War II. AT&T's Bell Telephone Laboratories, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, and U.S. Navy contractors like Sperry Gyroscope and Ford Instruments collaborated in this interdisciplinary endeavor. Fire control entailed obtaining data on incoming planes or missiles, projecting their course, and computing an intercepting solution. Analog computers were proven and suited for this circumstance.
Mindell's book sheds valuable light on the contributions of many brilliant technologists, among them Thornton Fry, Harold Black, Harry Nyquist, George Stibitz, Hendrik Bode, and Claude Shannon from Bell Labs, and Harold Hazen, Gordon Brown, Norbert Wiener, and Samuel Caldwell of MIT. His book also adds further evidence of the extraordinary legacies of Vannevar Bush and Warren Weaver. During World War II, Bush headed the National Defense Research Committee that provided an avenue for civilian scientists to contribute toward military technologies. Bush chose his friend mathematician Weaver from the Rockefeller Foundation to steer the important project of fire control.