This book studies how a technological innovation -- in this case the computer -- progresses from its origin as an idea in someone's mind to its eventual manifestation as a useable and marketable consumer product.

IBM was the world’s leading provider of information technologies for much of the twentieth century. What made it so successful for such a long time, and what lessons can this iconic corporation teach present-day enterprises?James W. Cortada—a business historian who worked at IBM for many years—pinpoints the crucial role of IBM’s corporate culture. He provides an inside look at how this culture emerged and evolved over the course of nearly a century, bringing together the perspectiv...

IBM was the world’s leading provider of information technologies for much of the twentieth century. What made it so successful for such a long time, and what lessons can this iconic corporation teach present-day enterprises?James W. Cortada—a business historian who worked at IBM for many years—pinpoints the crucial role of IBM’s corporate culture. He provides an inside look at how this culture emerged and evolved over the course of nearly a century, bringing together the perspectiv...

All the Facts presents a history of the role of information in the United States since 1870, when the nation began a nearly 150-year period of economic prosperity and technological and scientific transformations. James Cortada argues that citizens and their institutions used information extensively as tools to augment their work and private lives and that they used facts to help shape how the nation evolved during these fourteen decades. He argues that information's role has long ...

This book describes tacit knowledge, what it is, how it used and its role in our current data driven world. It argues that fuzzy, hard-to describe information is greater and more, important than just hard facts.What is tacit knowledge? It is what we might consider knowledge that is unable to be fully communicated: knowledge that we understand implicitly, but it is a bit hard to explain. For example, it is the kind of knowledge one needs to ride a bicycle, but that ...

This is the third and final volume in a broad study about the role of information largely in the Unites States since the early nineteenth century. This book summarizes how information changed since the early 1800s, what it looks like today, including how it is being influenced by such current circumstances as the role of Big Data, artificial intelligence, misinformation on the Internet, and the automation of decision-making by computers using digital and analog information. It is designed ...

The Digital Hand, Volume 2, is a historical survey of how computers and telecommunications have been deployed in over a dozen industries in the financial, telecommunications, media and entertainment sectors over the past half century. It is past of a sweeping three-volume description of how management in some forty industries embraced the computer and changed the American economy. Computers have fundamentally changed the nature of work in America. However it is difficult to grasp ...

The computing technology on which we are now so dependent has risen to its position of ascendency so rapidly that few of us have had the opportunity to take a step back and wonder where we are headed. This book urges us to do so.Taking a big-picture perspective on digital technology, Living with Computers leads the reader on a whistle-stop tour of the history of information and information technology. This journey culminates in a deep exploration into the meaning and role ...

This text presents an historical examination of political fact-checking, highlighting how this is part of a larger phenomenon of online scrutiny that manifests itself in multiple forms. Reflecting the long history of “fake facts” in America, the book discusses important developments in this area from the emergence of the public Internet in the 1990s to the start of the Trump-Clinton presidential election campaigns.Topics and features: describes how some of the major players in poli...

This book makes the startling case that North Americans were getting on the "information highway" as early as the 1700's, and have been using it as a critical building block of their social, economic, and political world ever since. By the time of the founding of the United States, there was a postal system and roads for the distribution of mail, copyright laws to protect intellectual property, and newspapers, books, and broadsides to bring information to a populace that was building a nat...

A former IBM employee offers an authoritative history of the successes and failures of one of the most influential American companies of the last century.For decades, IBM shaped the way the world did business. IBM products were in every large organization, and IBM corporate culture established a management style that was imitated by companies around the globe. It was “Big Blue”—an icon. And yet over the years, IBM has gone through both failure and success, survivin...

A guide to information as the transformative tool of modern business.While we have been preoccupied with the latest i-gadget from Apple and with Google's ongoing expansion, we may have missed something: the fundamental transformation of whole firms and industries into giant information-processing machines. Today, more than eighty percent of workers collect and analyze information (often in digital form) in the course of doing their jobs. This book offers a guide to...