Proceedings of a Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery. Proceedings... Jointly sponsored by the Navy Department Bureau of Ordnance and Harvard University a the Computation Laboratory 7-10 January 1947
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press 1948. First Edition. [2 - 1st blank], xxix (including frontis), [1-blank], [1]-302 pages. Publishers navy blue cloth, with minor bump to base near spine. Dust jacket is edgeworn with small edge tears and minor loss at corners and head/tail of spine panel. Also has some soiling at the flap folds. Even so it presents nicely on the shelf. Volume XVI in the Annals of the Computation Laboratory of Harvard University. This copy from the library of Harvard physicist and symposium participant Harry R. Mimno (his signature on front pastedown). Very Good / Good. Hardcover. [18408]
Publishes papers from the "first full-scale symposium on electronic and electro-mechanical digital computers. The symposium took place more than a year after the first postwar conference on mechanical and electronic computation techniques, held at MIT in October 1945, for which no proceedings were published." Howard Aiken, head of Harvard's Computation Laboratory, organized the conference. The papers cover aspects of computer design, construction, operation, and emerging applications. The proceedings offer one of the most comprehensive pictures of this rapidly emerging field in the post-war years. Seven of the papers here presented are listed separately in Hook & Norman's Origins of Cyberspace, and the members and attendees of the Symposium represent a veritable "Who's Who" of distinguished contributing scientists, mathematicians, and engineers (Aiken, Mauchly, Goldstine and Forrester spoke among others, with Turing, Hopper, and many other luminaries in attendance). Topics ranged from credible memory devices to important early machines - aspects of the Mark I and II, Whirlwind, ENIAC, and EDVAC style machines are all discussed. While the earliest computer history work tends to the theoretical, this symposium had much of the practical side to offer. Uncommon in dust jacket. Origins of Cyberspace 414 (also 553, 609, 848, 902, 913, 924, 1136)
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