Between Human and Machine
Mindell ponders the orgin of cybernetics beyond Norbert Wiener's 1948 hypothesis. Mindell returns to the time between the World Wars, when four disparate computing research cultures thrived in the United States: the U.S. Navy, the Sperry Gyroscope Company, the Bell Telephone Laboratories, and Vannevar Bush's laboratory at MIT. In each culture, different technical problems, organizational imperatives, and working evironment existed, but they were all researching control, communications, and computing. When President Roosevelt synthesized the four engineering cultures into a representative government committee, they suffused engineering research with good principles and later made it possible for Norbert Wiener's 1948 formulation of cybernetics.
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What Hacker News says
- I read 'The Secret War' by Brian Johnson which was based on a 1970s BBC series. I think it's an earlier version of the same thing.
Another great (although very dry) book is 'Between Human and Machine - Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics' by David A. Mindell. This goes into the fire control stuff that I mentioned, and describes how one effect of the war was to force together the different groups that were working on analogue computation.
- I highly recommend "Between Human and Machine Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics" by David A. Mindell
- You may enjoy "Between Human and Machine Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics" by David A. Mindell.
- Also not directly related:
David A. Mindell, "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics" https://press.jhu.edu/books/title/1207/between-human-and-mac...
Absolutely epic book.
- I have seen a lot of push back in various forums and whenever this link is tweeted but a lot of it seems to conflate "materials science" and "civil engineering" or "mechanical engineering." There is a very big difference between understanding historical trends--which is very important--and designing viable positive sum technology ecosystems. That being said, here are six technology historians I have found very insightful:
Donald Cardwell in "Turning Points in Western Technology"
Joel Mokyr in "Lever of Riches" and "Gifts of Athena"
Edward Hutchinson in "Cognition in the Wild"
James Utterback "Mastering the Dynamics of Innovation"
David A. Mindell "Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics"
Stephen B. Johnson "The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs"
- An excellent book on this subject (without any of the heavyhanded Big Tech comparisons) is “Between Human and Machine: Feedback, Control, and Computing before Cybernetics”, by David Mindell who also wrote the great “Digital Apollo”.
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