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Glancing 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: T
by mjn 9y ago
Glancing 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.