A Computer Perspective

Charles Eames

Ray Eames

Edited by Glen Fleck

Producer Robert Staples

Introduction by I. Bernard Cohen

    A Computer Perspective is an illustrated essay on the origins and first lines of development of the computer. The complex network of creative forces and social pressures that have produced the computer is personified here in the creators of instruments of computation, and their machines or tables; the inventors of mathematical or logical concepts and their applications; and the fabricators of practical devices to serve the immediate needs of government, commerce, engineering, and science.

    The book is based on an exhibition conceived and assembled for International Business Machines Corporation. Like the exhibition, it is not a history in the narrow sense of a chronology of concepts and devices. Yet these pages actually display more true history (in relation to the computer) than many more conventional presentations of the development of science and technology.

  • Cover: A Computer Perspective

I. Bernard Cohen, Victor S. Thomas Professor of the History of Science, Emeritus, at Harvard University, is one of the founders of the modern study of the history of science.