james gleick the information a history a theory a flood

The complexities she encountered for the first time became familiar to programmers of the next century.'

She programmed it in her mind, because the machine did not yet exist. For example, here is his stimulating comment on a letter from Lovelace to Babbage (p119): The other thing that keeps the reader's attention is Gleick's entertaining, assured writing style (already familiar to those of us who've read his excellent biography of Richard Feynman ). Focussing the story on the personalities is a shrewd touch, as it keeps the tale interesting, even for the non-specialist who might otherwise get bogged down in the technical details of things such as entropy measurement, quantum computing, and the propagation of memes. Along the way, the author discusses the work of such pioneers as Charles Babbage (who invented the mechanical computer), Ada Lovelace (who worked with Babbage and is considered the world's first computer programmer), Samuel Morse (inventor of the single-wire telegraph), and Claude Shannon, who - as the original information theorist - is the real hero of the book. Here's a book which examines several aspects of the history of information and communication, beginning with African drums and ending up with Wikipedia. The Information is the story of how we got here and where we are heading. And we sometimes feel we are drowning, swept by a deluge of signs and signals, news and images, blogs and tweets. Citizens of this world become experts willy-nilly: aficionados of bits and bytes. He provides portraits of the key figures contributing to the inexorable development of our modern understanding of information: Charles Babbage, the idiosyncratic inventor of the first great mechanical computer Ada Byron, the brilliant and doomed daughter of the poet, who became the first true programmer pivotal figures like Samuel Morse and Alan Turing and Claude Shannon, the creator of information theory itself.

From the invention of scripts and alphabets to the long-misunderstood talking drums of Africa, Gleick tells the story of information technologies that changed the very nature of human consciousness. The story of information begins in a time profoundly unlike our own, when every thought and utterance vanishes as soon as it is born.

James Gleick, the author of the best sellers Chaos and Genius, now brings us a work just as astonishing and masterly: a revelatory chronicle and meditation that shows how information has become the modern eras defining qualitythe blood, the fuel, the vital principle of our world.

James gleick the information a history a theory a flood