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While I'm a fan of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and I'm sure this is a well-researched article, it seems a bit odd to call it the "Modern History of
by jdale27 9y ago
While I'm a fan of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and I'm sure this is a well-researched article, it seems a bit odd to call it the "Modern History of Computing", given that it seems to leave off in the 1950s. Although maybe the SEP editors think that the philosophical implications of computing were all figured out by then?
- pgeorgi 9y agoIt's a philosophy department, and they (like many of the social sciences) have pretty precise ideas what "modern" means. The 1950s is probably the latest decade that they could put into the "modern" bucket. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history which calls 1945-and-later "contemporary history".
- abe_duarte 9y agoI´m not sure. The world modern is used to name specific periods of time. Example, modern history--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history Maybe a historian named this period as such in the history of computing.
- mjn 9y agoGlancing at the bibliography, I notice that the author of this article, B. Jack Copeland, also wrote a book entitled Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine: The Master Codebreaker's Struggle to Build the Modern Computer. It makes a little more sense in that context, using "modern computer" to mean broadly what we now thing of as a computer, i.e. an electronic, stored-program, general-purpose computer, versus previous more special-purpose and/or electromechanical computing machines. It still reads funnily to me when phrased as "the modern history of computing", though. The book title's approach, which is more like "the history of how we got to the modern computer", makes clearer what he means.