The Second Age of Computer Science

From Algol Genes to Neural Nets

By: Subrata Dasgupta

Narrated by: Mike Chamberlain

By the end of the 1960s, a new discipline named computer science had come into being. A new scientific paradigm - the "computational paradigm" - was in place, suggesting that computer science had reached a certain level of maturity. Yet as a science, it was still precociously young. New forces, some technological, some socioeconomic, some cognitive, impinged upon it; the outcome of which was that new kinds of computational problems arose over the next two decades. Indeed, by the beginning of the 1990s, the structure of the computational paradigm looked markedly different in many important respects from how it was at the end of the 1960s.

Author Subrata Dasgupta named the two decades from 1970 to 1990 as the second age of computer science to distinguish it from the preceding genesis of the science and the age of the Internet/World Wide Web that followed. This book describes the evolution of computer science in this second age in the form of seven overlapping, intermingling, parallel histories that unfold concurrently in the course of the two decades.

©2018 Oxford University Press (P)2018 HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books

audible version (loved it)

I really wanted to get my bearings on why programs and computers are set up how they are. I work in IT and maintain lots of legacy code.

this book really helped me understand the long arm of history that got programs to where they are, and I wish I could listen to the same author about modern day languages. (this only goes up to like the 80's).

I got used to the code snippets being said line by line and, honestly, it's turned into a useful practice for picturing what the code did.

definitely would recommend this to any starting dev or curious programmer or historian of technology. very fun.