Alan turing: the enigma

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira KnightleyIt is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912–1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the comp...

Coding capitalism

Devin Kennedy offers a new history of the digital economy, showing how the computer emerged from—and transformed—capitalism in the United States.

Computing in the age of decolonization

How Cold War geopolitics and domestic capitalism changed the trajectory of India’s computing industryIndia today is widely recognized for producing world-class tech talent and Silicon Valley leaders, yet captures only a fraction of the global tech industry’s profits, primarily providing skilled b...

Hackers

New media behind the iron curtain

During the years of the Polish People’s Republic, Poles were cut off from the western world. This situation led to a period of great ingenuity in the realm of media. Coupling archival research with in-depth interviews, this book explores media behind the Iron Curtain, bringing to life the talent ...

Silence, screen, and spectacle

Takes on an innovative focus on “spectacular memory,” asking how spectacle functions in processes of memory, countermemory, and silencing. Breaks new ground in the discussion of absence, both in terms of the ‘absent,’ missing dialogues, texts, monuments and communities, as well as the “d...

The computers that made britain

The home computer boom of the 1980s brought with it now-iconic machines such as the ZX Spectrum, BBC Micro, and Commodore 64. Those machines would inspire a generation and foster the creation of a booming British software industry that continues to this day.With the help of hefty government disco...

The computers that made the world

Discover the birth of the technological world we now live in through the origins of 12 influential computers built between 1939 and 1950.​In 1940, a computer was someone who ploughed through grueling calculations each day. A decade later, a computer was a buzzing machine that filled a room. This ...

The discrete charm of the machine

The genesis of the digital idea and why it transformed civilizationA few short decades ago, we were informed by the smooth signals of analog television and radio; we communicated using our analog telephones; and we even computed with analog computers. Today our world is digital, built with zeros ...

The irrational decision

How the computer revolution shaped our conception of rationality—and why human problems require solutions rooted in human intuition, morality, and judgmentIn the 1940s, mathematicians set out to design computers that could act as ideal rational agents in the face of uncertainty. The Irrational De...

The peep diaries

One man's journey through a rapidly transforming culture of lying, spying, revealing, and confessing.

Zx spectrum demoscene

This book describes three phenomena in digital media. Firstly, it concerns the 8-bit personal computer ZX Spectrum produced by the British company Sinclair Research since 1982. As a publication about a specific platform, it falls into the mainstream category of platform studies and it pays specia...