"The pixellated rectangle we spend most of our day staring at in silence is not the television, as many long feared, but the computer--the ubiquitous portal of work and personal lives. The computer is now so common we don't even notice it. It is difficult to envision that not so long ago it was a room-sized structure accessible only by a few, a mysterious machine inspiring fear, awe and respect. Now that it has decreased in size and increased in popular...

This book covers modern computing from the development of the first electronic digital computer through the dot-com crash. The author concentrates on five key moments of transition: the transformation of the computer in the late 1940s from a specialized scientific instrument to a commercial product; the emergence of small systems in the late 1960s; the beginning of personal computing in the 1970s; the spread of networking after 1985; and, in a chapter...

"The P-NP problem is the most important open problem in computer science, if not all of mathematics. Simply stated, it asks whether every problem whose solution can be quickly checked by computer can also be solved by computer. This book provides a nontechnical introduction to P-NP, its rich history, and its algorithmic implications for everything we do with computers and beyond. In this book, the author traces how the problem arose during the Cold...