Best computer history & culture books according to redditors

We found 103 Reddit comments discussing the best computer history & culture books. We ranked the 37 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the top 20.

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Subcategories:

Books on Biographies
Internet law books
Computing industry history books
Digital currencies books

Top Reddit comments about Computer History & Culture:

u/Lee_Ars · 1367 pointsr/space

Hamilton is brilliant and contributed massively to the Apollo Guidance Computer's development, but this comic gets things wrong.

The 1202 and 1201 errors that occurred during the Apollo 11 landing were not because of a checklist error. The "checklist error" most often cited is Buzz Aldrin's activating the LM's rendezvous radar prior to landing, but this was established procedure, not an error. The reason was that if the crew had to abort the landing, the rendezvous radar would be needed to find the Command Module; powering it up prior to landing meant that in the event of an abort it would already be on and the crew would have one less thing to do.

The errors were properly because of a design documentation error that resulted in the possibility of two separate pieces of equipment on the LM randomly being fed out-of-phase power, based on when a certain set of switches were toggled. The out of phase power resulted in spurious interrupts to the AGC, which resulted in it running out of temp storage areas, which resulted in the program alarms.

Although Hamilton was the Software Engineering Division boss at the MIT instrumentation lab, Hal Laning wrote most of the Apollo Guidance Comptuer's Executive routine, which was the actual code responsible for the LM computer's ability to restart its tasks—especially the BAILOUT, P00DOO, and FRESHSTART routines.

Not downplay Hamilton's contributions—she designed and coded a lot of the AGC's Interpreter program, which allowed the AGC to run a sort of "virtual machine" that could execute tasks the AGC the lacked hardware to accomplish (for example, the Interpreter let the AGC do vector math, even though its hardware couldn't do operations on vector data types).

It's unfortunate that this comic comes so close to getting it right, then falls back on misinformation for the truly important bits.

For a much more in-depth explanation of how and why behind Apollo 11's almost-aborts, you can check this piece I wrote for Ars, or you can read the far more detailed (and, frankly, better!) description by Don Eyles, who was actually there when it all went down.

tl;dr - Hamilton is a brilliant engineer who wrote a lot of the code that made the moon landing possible. Her role is often sadly overlooked. But this comic at best massively oversimplifies and at worst is just flat-out wrong. A checklist error did not almost derail the first moon landing, and Hamilton did not write the Executive code that enabled the Apollo Guidance Computer to do its BAILOUT restarts. Her equally valuable contributions were elsewhere.

(edit - changed "was" to "is" because she's still very much alive)

(edit^2 - Thanks for the gold, kind stranger! Anyone wanting to know a hell of a lot more about the amazing machine that was the Apollo Guidance Computer should consult O'Brein's The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation, which is probably the most authoritative text on not just how the AGC worked, but why. You've probably heard people say "Oh, we flew to the moon on less power than a calculator watch!" but that's a misrepresentation of the power of the AGC. It wasn't a general purpose computer, not really—it was more like an extremely sophisticated embedded controller.

More to the point, the people who programmed it did so without the decades of real-time computing experience we have today. It's one thing to create a computer that does its job so well that it handles failures gracefully even while landing on the moon; it's another thing entirely to do it for the very first time and thereby also effectively create the entire field of modern real-time computing.

u/happyscrappy · 87 pointsr/TrueReddit

Even though he was spurred by Beat the Dealer, his system is akin a bit more akin to what was done in The Eudaemonic Pie than to card counting.

There's no real "code" to crack in a parimutuel system. You can have all the math you want in your system and all you are really doing is betting you are better at picking winners than other betters are. Maybe you're right, and maybe you're wrong, but you can't sit down at a computer and prove it.

Given parimutuel is an open system which alters odds based upon other bettors, you can find betting combinations that exploit your allegedly better picking better than other bettors can. If you can beat them you can win money without beating the house. You're not even supposed to be able to beat the house in parimutuel, it is designed so they have no skin in the game.

u/P-Nuts · 70 pointsr/linux

This book might help. (I haven't read it, I just remember seeing it and putting it on my Amazon wish-list for a mythical time when I'm off work for long enough that reading code recreationally seems like a good idea.)

u/GMU2012 · 59 pointsr/MURICA

Ehh...it happened in the Great Depression when several thousand Americans went to the Soviet Russia (yes really) to escape economic or racial hardships.

It's pretty well documented.

u/FullMetalHackIt · 24 pointsr/history

The author of that article, Jo Marchant, wrote a pretty good book about the Antikythera Mechanism. It's definitely worth a read.

u/teraflop · 20 pointsr/askscience

The onboard Apollo Guidance Computer could do trigonometric calculations (which depend indirectly on the value of pi) to about 8 decimal digits of precision. (Check out this book if you want the gory details.)

u/AnatoleKonstantin · 16 pointsr/IAmA

In addition to Solzhenitsyn, I would recommend the book The Forsaken which is about Americans volunteering to build socialism in the Soviet Union.

u/OwMyBoatingArm · 16 pointsr/AskHistorians

This is a tough topic to discuss without delving into conspiracy theories. The problem of which is that they're difficult to prove.

For example: Tim Tzouliadis wrote a book called The Forsaken which was about the emigration of thousands of Americans to the Soviet Union during the height of the Depression. Many of these Americans bought into the hype that things in the Soviet Union were going amazingly well. Food was cheap, jobs were plentiful, people had homes to live in. Many Black Americans also went over because they wanted to embrace the supposed racial equality that the communists espoused. So many Americans emigrated over that Russian cities had baseball teams that played against one another.

Henry Ford even worked with the Russians to build a factory there to build Ford automobiles. For a time, things were going well for Americans in the USSR. The Soviets accepted them as brothers and sisters in socialism. That was until the Purges happened. The Americans in the USSR had their passports confiscated, they were denied protection by the US Embassy, and they were all sent out to Siberia to mine gold in what can be considered to be "death camps". President FDR and his predecessors were aware of this, but did nothing. To them, these Americans who renounced their nation and abandoned it were themselves abandoned to the Soviets.

The big thing here is the confiscated passports. The KGB (technically the NKVD at the time) supposedly confiscated them all and then used them to ship spies back to the US with a singular goal in mind: to infiltrate the United States of America. There were thousands of these people, all with stolen US passports, trained to infiltrate various academic, political, and industrial institutions to form the backbone of the spy network that would plague the United States for decades.

The "Conspiracy" part of this is that these agents worked with domestic Communist and Socialist types to bring about a plan to influence America over time by taking control of the newspapers and the educational systems to push their socialist message. Does any proof of this exist? No. But this is the nature of most conspiracies. With great influence in the media and education, these folks could easily work within these liberal organizations and hide their true motivations. To be fair, there isn't much for them to organize as these institutions tended to be quite progressive under normal conditions, but this is simply great cover to push their agenda on generations of Americans.

u/gangli0n · 14 pointsr/talesfromtechsupport

> He also worked on the guidance system for Polaris missiles, which was later adapted for use in the Apollo program!

MIT Instrumentation Laboratory? That was – worldwide! – probably one of the coolest places to work at until the 1970s or so. (At that point, the AI lab perhaps took a little bit over over. Also, PARC happened at that time.)

Also, required reading.

u/gsmelov · 10 pointsr/KotakuInAction

That is absolutely not true at all.

There's too much to excerpt but a significant portion of that book goes into the ability of people "to see cruelty, and burn not", because it's always seen as real socialism until the bodies stack up too high to be denied anymore. And the bodies were already stacking up.

u/DalmutiG · 10 pointsr/flatearth

If you were genuinely interested then you could read “The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation” by Frank O’Brien. A detailed 460 page book that covers it very well.

Or you could read NASA’s published texts about it (this overview is a good start)

Or you could play with the Virtual AGC simulator on your PC.

Or you could study the source code on github

But I suspect you’d rather remain ignorant and make unfounded claims about how impossible it was. 🙄

u/Do_not_reply_to_me · 9 pointsr/engineering
u/cowpowered · 8 pointsr/AskHistorians

The most interesting book I read about the Apollo Guidance Computer is "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation". It is a very technical (and often quite dry) book. But if you can get past the dryness it can be fascinating. It really made me appreciate the ingenuity of the engineers of that era. Doing a lot, with a little. Some familiarity with computer architecture is recommended.

u/TheGoddamBatman · 8 pointsr/geek

That's because it doesn't violate the 4th Amendment.

I'm 1000% in support of the RestoretheFourth kids, but the fact is, the 4th Amendment has been eroded away to practically nothing over the course of 200ish years of case law -- and it's been accelerating since the 1970s. The common understanding of "privacy" and the legal understanding are wildly different.

For more, read the excellent Nothing to Hide (don't click unless you don't mind being put on a watchlist).

I wish it weren't so, but the Fourth Amendment is kind of already super broken. Legal arguments against surveillance are better served, IMO, by basing them on the chilling effects they have on the First Amendment rights of the survielled.

u/someuname · 7 pointsr/cableporn

If you haven't read it already I highly recommend the book [Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight] (https://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Human-Machine-Spaceflight/dp/0262516101). Really fascinating and detailed read. It delves in detail of the development of the Apollo digital computer. It also talks extensively about the tension between analog and digital and control from a pilot's perspective verses the engineers.

u/dgriffith · 6 pointsr/SpaceXLounge

If you've got the time, go read the book "Digital Apollo" (Amazon Link) which details a lot of the political and technical problems they had with early space development.

Basically astronauts came over from test pilots and they were very much against automatic controls and taking a back seat to computers. When engineers realised that they needed fly-by-wire at the very minimum to make spaceflight happen, there was much protesting from test pilots who still wanted to have manual actuation of control surfaces and attitude jets "just in case".

When they developed the Saturn V, even though it was obvious that the reaction speed of a human being was in no way going to cut it, it still took a huge amount of convincing for them to finally get the idea that the pilots were going to be just passengers until they reached orbit. A few of the pioneer astronauts (Glenn and Armstrong most notably) knew the deal and knew they needed computer assistance, but there were quite a few holdouts. Even Armstrong's "manual override of the computer" on Apollo 11 still resulted in him using fly-by-wire to make a landing - he was basically just directing the computer to "move over here a bit, and descend at this rate" and it did all the hard work of balancing the spacecraft on its one engine.

This undercurrent of manual control still existed in the Astronaut corps when the Shuttle came along and they still wanted a guy in the seat flicking switches.

u/humblepatriot · 6 pointsr/AskAnAmerican

Some of the POW camps in Germany were liberated by the Red Army, which sent many of the US POWs on rail cars to work in the Gulag.

This was a subtopic in an excellent book by Tim Tzouliadis about Americans who went to the USSR and never came back. The Forsaken: An American Tragedy in Stalin’s Russia

u/VoteRonaldRayGun · 5 pointsr/starterpacks

Why men took over coding and computers has been well researched. How about Stanford as a source. There have been entire books written about it. There were many factors at play, such as restricting women from being promoted, harrassing women out the industry, marketing aimed solely at men, entirely male management, etc.

I didn't make the comparison to slavery, early suffragettes made the comparison to slavery. Women like Angelina Grimké Weld were important in both the anti-slavery and pro-suffrage movements. There was a big overlap betwen the two in the 19th century, the suffragette movement only became racist in the 1910s when Liberal Progressives (who were often Southern Democrats, not the modern kind) adoped support.

A wife belonged to their husband, a daughter belonged to their father, this was rightly compared with black people being owned by slave masters. Slavery as an institution lasted many centuries without showign signs of ending. As for women's role in society, it wasn't always Victorian Era style views. Women went up and down in power and influenced depending on the region and time. Some places even had matriachal societies. However, in conventional Western counties society is patriachal and has for thousands of years suppresed women. Something being astonishingly bad doesn't make it less true.

The cause behind women being a minority in certain professions is specifically caused by this society. If you are encourged to be a housewife, and discouraged from learning about certain things it's less likely you will build an interest and make a career out of them.

How many exceptions are needed before you accept something? A thousand? A million? If you're using this as a judgement for when something stops being an exception, then that is your definition of progress. In my law school, 50% of students are women, because the legal profession has opened the doors and welcome women soliciters and barristers. There are still problems, sexism still exists, but other industries which have not been welcoming will of course have fewer women going into them.

This is all without mentioning the counter to treating women as housewives. Which is that men are incapable of looking after children, working certain jobs deemed feminine, etc. Which is also abdsurd and foolish.

u/Lars0 · 5 pointsr/space

NASA definitely did not develop the microprocessor, but they did play a huge role in spurring their advance.

The choice for apollo to have a transistor based, all digital computer was a very risky one. It ended up consuming a huge amount of resources and became a very critical aspect of the mission.

The advancements that were made in the speed and reliability, as well as pushing the state of the art in programming, had a huge affect on computation. To read an excellent book on the apollo digital computer and its development, read Digital Apollo

u/geriatricbaby · 4 pointsr/FeMRADebates

>Whether these differences are cultural or biological is rather moot when the proposed approach is the alter the field to accommodate them.

You say this as if it's a problem but the fact of the matter is the field was altered to accommodate men so I don't see why it can't make more shifts.

>So it's not so much that women were directly discouraged from entering the field as cultural trends led to a massive uptick in male interest and downtick in female interest.

Nothing in what you've quoted supports the idea that women weren't directly discouraged from entering the fields while there was also a cultural shift. Meanwhile, another historian of the field provides a longer timeline:

>In 1967, despite the optimistic tone of Cosmopolitan’s “Computer Girls” article, the programming profession was already becoming masculinized. Male computer programmers sought to increase the prestige of their field, through creating professional associations, through erecting educational requirements for programming careers, and through discouraging the hiring of women. Increasingly, computer industry ad campaigns linked women staffers to human error and inefficiency.

---

>Provide some evidence to support this idea. These are claims I hear made frequently but are never backed up with any sort of sources. Show which associations did what to discourage hiring of women. Provide examples of these ads that disparage women staffers. Explain where such math and personality tests were used and how they were biased against women.

There are whole books on the subject. Here's one.

Here's another.

Here's another about the UK.

The information you seek is in those books which I don't have readily available to me, otherwise I'd quote them for you.

u/aGorilla · 4 pointsr/compsci

The Pragmatic Programmer, which lead to this wonderful bookshelf (scroll down, it's the last book listed).

The Mythical Man Month. Pretty much required reading.

Darwin Among the Machines. Not exactly programming, but a damn good read.

Not a book, but an article that most programmers would find interesting:
Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years.

u/bg-j38 · 4 pointsr/politics

There were already a bunch of Americans who "fled" to Russia and it worked out pretty well for them.

u/capnrefsmmat · 4 pointsr/restorethefourth

I'd have to refer you to the linked article and the book it refers to; I don't know any good examples.

But I think it's best not to respond to "I have nothing to hide" with "Yes you do." Privacy isn't about hiding things from the government. It's the issues of government power which are more important.

There's also a book (which I have not yet read), Nothing to Hide: The False Tradeoff between Privacy and Security, also by Daniel Solove.

u/Alrik · 3 pointsr/privacy

It really depends on what you mean by "privacy." To wrap your head around all the different ways it's used, Dan Solove's article "A Taxonomy of Privacy" is a good read.

In general, Dan Solove's Nothing to Hide is definitely worth reading.

Robert O'Harrow's No Place to Hide is another good one.

Not books, but Peter Fleischer's blog, Bruce Schneier's blog, and Eugene Volokh's blog.

Also, privacy is kind of the flip-side of the free speech coin, so you'll want to read up on that. There are a bunch of authors that write about the privacy/free speech dichotomy, so here's a random list of various interesting things I've read recently: Eugene Volokh, Robert Larson, Anita Allen, Woodrow Hartzog, etc.

u/ADuckIsMyFiend · 3 pointsr/math

The man who loved only numbers (on Erdos)

The imitation game Alan Turing: The Enigma (on Turing, much more in depth (and accurate) than the movie on both the life and mathematics).

And not a biography per say, When Computers Were Human, but there is a lot of focus on the people involved.

u/kodheaven · 3 pointsr/IntellectualDarkWeb

In this episode of the Making Sense podcast, Sam Harris introduces John Brockman’s new anthology, “Possible Minds: 25 Ways of Looking at AI,” in conversation with three of its authors: George Dyson, Alison Gopnik, and Stuart Russell.

George Dyson is a historian of technology. He is also the author of Darwin Among the Machines and Turing’s Cathedral.

Alison Gopnik is a developmental psychologist at UC Berkeley and a leader in the field of children’s learning and development. Her books include The Philosophical Baby.

Stuart Russell is a Professor of Computer Science and Engineering at UC Berkeley. He is the author of (with Peter Norvig) of Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, the most widely used textbook on AI.

u/isthisnuf · 3 pointsr/EngineeringPorn

If you enjoyed this video you might enjoy this book: The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation.

u/Tetracyclic · 3 pointsr/programming

I'd highly recommend Frank O'Brien's book The Apollo Guidance Computer for a tour of the hardware and software that landed humanity on the Moon.

u/lowspeedlowdrag · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

Have you read "Digital Apollo"? If not you should.

u/jerry-seinfeld · 2 pointsr/pics

Check out this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Computing/dp/B00008MNVW/ref=pd_sim_b_39

It might get you a little further as to who you'd think would be in a photo like that.

u/CSMastermind · 2 pointsr/AskComputerScience

Senior Level Software Engineer Reading List


Read This First


  1. Mastery: The Keys to Success and Long-Term Fulfillment

    Fundamentals


  2. Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture
  3. Enterprise Integration Patterns: Designing, Building, and Deploying Messaging Solutions
  4. Enterprise Patterns and MDA: Building Better Software with Archetype Patterns and UML
  5. Systemantics: How Systems Work and Especially How They Fail
  6. Rework
  7. Writing Secure Code
  8. Framework Design Guidelines: Conventions, Idioms, and Patterns for Reusable .NET Libraries

    Development Theory


  9. Growing Object-Oriented Software, Guided by Tests
  10. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design with Applications
  11. Introduction to Functional Programming
  12. Design Concepts in Programming Languages
  13. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective
  14. Modern Operating Systems
  15. Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change
  16. The Elements of Computing Systems: Building a Modern Computer from First Principles
  17. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software

    Philosophy of Programming


  18. Making Software: What Really Works, and Why We Believe It
  19. Beautiful Code: Leading Programmers Explain How They Think
  20. The Elements of Programming Style
  21. A Discipline of Programming
  22. The Practice of Programming
  23. Computer Systems: A Programmer's Perspective
  24. Object Thinking
  25. How to Solve It by Computer
  26. 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know: Collective Wisdom from the Experts

    Mentality


  27. Hackers and Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
  28. The Intentional Stance
  29. Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes In The Age Of The Machine
  30. The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures
  31. The Timeless Way of Building
  32. The Soul Of A New Machine
  33. WIZARDRY COMPILED
  34. YOUTH
  35. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

    Software Engineering Skill Sets


  36. Software Tools
  37. UML Distilled: A Brief Guide to the Standard Object Modeling Language
  38. Applying UML and Patterns: An Introduction to Object-Oriented Analysis and Design and Iterative Development
  39. Practical Parallel Programming
  40. Past, Present, Parallel: A Survey of Available Parallel Computer Systems
  41. Mastering Regular Expressions
  42. Compilers: Principles, Techniques, and Tools
  43. Computer Graphics: Principles and Practice in C
  44. Michael Abrash's Graphics Programming Black Book
  45. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security
  46. SOA in Practice: The Art of Distributed System Design
  47. Data Mining: Practical Machine Learning Tools and Techniques
  48. Data Crunching: Solve Everyday Problems Using Java, Python, and more.

    Design


  49. The Psychology Of Everyday Things
  50. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
  51. Design for Hackers: Reverse Engineering Beauty
  52. The Non-Designer's Design Book

    History


  53. Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality
  54. Death March
  55. Showstopper! the Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
  56. The PayPal Wars: Battles with eBay, the Media, the Mafia, and the Rest of Planet Earth
  57. The Business of Software: What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad
  58. In the Beginning...was the Command Line

    Specialist Skills


  59. The Art of UNIX Programming
  60. Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment
  61. Programming Windows
  62. Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X
  63. Starting Forth: An Introduction to the Forth Language and Operating System for Beginners and Professionals
  64. lex & yacc
  65. The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference
  66. C Programming Language
  67. No Bugs!: Delivering Error Free Code in C and C++
  68. Modern C++ Design: Generic Programming and Design Patterns Applied
  69. Agile Principles, Patterns, and Practices in C#
  70. Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit

    DevOps Reading List


  71. Time Management for System Administrators: Stop Working Late and Start Working Smart
  72. The Practice of Cloud System Administration: DevOps and SRE Practices for Web Services
  73. The Practice of System and Network Administration: DevOps and other Best Practices for Enterprise IT
  74. Effective DevOps: Building a Culture of Collaboration, Affinity, and Tooling at Scale
  75. DevOps: A Software Architect's Perspective
  76. The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations
  77. Site Reliability Engineering: How Google Runs Production Systems
  78. Cloud Native Java: Designing Resilient Systems with Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, and Cloud Foundry
  79. Continuous Delivery: Reliable Software Releases through Build, Test, and Deployment Automation
  80. Migrating Large-Scale Services to the Cloud
u/xylltch · 2 pointsr/todayilearned

Not just banks, but all kinds of computations. Probably the first examples of organized computation dealt with astronomical data, such as computing the orbit of Halley's Comet or creating tables for navigational almanacs.

I just finished this book on the subject, and found it absolutely fascinating. Highly recommended if you're interested in historical/scientific stuff.

Actually, go ahead and take a look at this one too. Computers were mostly given one set of instructions to compute at a time and the big picture was left to the few people in charge. This book offers great account of the origins of our modern scientific method (in the same time period as some of the first book), and of course a look at a very different part of the scientific world of the day.

u/ObnoxiousFactczecher · 2 pointsr/space
  1. The Apollo 11 issues are described here in detail.

  2. The terminal phase of landing was semi-automatic at best, not really manual. It was performed mostly because of the computer's inability to read the terrain details, and inadequacy of orbital maps. It simply couldn't have known how suitable the surface was in the point in which it would have landed automatically.

  3. Read the book Digital Apollo, you'll probably find pretty much all details you'll want to know in it.
u/NullOfUndefined · 2 pointsr/retrogaming

Breakout is very good.

I’ve also heard good things about Masters Of Doom but I haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

u/mwcz · 2 pointsr/retrobattlestations

Different system, same sentiment.

Edit: I should have added: looks awesome! I love and miss that style.

u/sysop073 · 2 pointsr/programming

Also The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation, which goes into an alarming amount of detail

u/hga_another · 2 pointsr/KotakuInAction

I couldn't possibly imagine. (I just happen to right now be closing out my detailed reading on Whirlwind, with this book, the early history of computing is very interesting.)

u/FoolishChemist · 2 pointsr/explainlikeimfive

You may be interested in this book. I haven't read it yet, it's on my to do list.

http://www.amazon.com/The-Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture/dp/1441908765

u/scubascratch · 2 pointsr/TheAmpHour

Thank you this video was great. Are there more of these?

There is also a book I recommend by Eldon Hall, who is in the video: Journey to the Moon
It includes a lot more detail about each of the systems and components, as well as the software development and descriptions of the vendor selections and some astronaut visit stories.

u/UsingYourWifi · 1 pointr/cableporn

Apollo's guidance calculations aren't really all that computationally intensive. In-atmosphere is more complex than in a vacuum, but you don't need much computing horsepower to go to the moon.

Omega Tau has a great episode on the Apollo guidance computer that goes into a ton of detail on this. Very much worth a listen (the guest's book is also great - https://www.amazon.com/Apollo-Guidance-Computer-Architecture-Operation/dp/1441908765).

u/amazon-converter-bot · 1 pointr/FreeEBOOKS

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u/liverandeggsandmore · 1 pointr/Demotivational

David Mindell's "Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight" and Frank O'Brien's "The Apollo Guidance Computer: Architecture and Operation" give us a wealth of useful detail about all of the computer technology used in the Apollo program.

They include the details of the computers that ran on the orbiting and landing craft, as well as those on the ground.

u/satanic_hamster · 1 pointr/CapitalismVSocialism

> I'll have to look into the FSM but it sounds like you're 'robbing' from content creators so I don't think it's ethical to pirate anything.

Yeah, I understand the traditional argument, but there are plenty of powerful arguments against it as well. This is where I got it from if you're interested.

> I fall more on the socialist side but have disagreements with a complete abolishment of all elements of capitalism. I'm not too well versed on the language used by socialist however so my aversion to abolishment of private property might stem from that.

Yeah, its difficult to find a place to even begin learning about it, and even more confusing when you find out it has a very hybridized history. Market Socialists for example, fully accept Capital Markets, Wage Labor, all of the traditional elements of a Capitalist system, but differ radically on key aspects like the organizational character of the firm. China's a Market Socialist economy and its the 2nd largest economy in the world.

Navigating your way through the terms is half the conversation. But if you're ever interested, I can reference you works and why they're important.

> Inequality in the sense that some people will have more material goods than others. Some means of production will be unequally compensated compared to others.

It'd help me if you had a more concrete example.

> What exactly is your position then? Im only scrutinizing socialism because it sounds ideal but some aspects are difficult to achieve. I have much more criticism of capitalism than socialism

I'm a Socialist. I believe in the concept of Workers' Self-Management. I would like the abolition of Private Property Rights as imagined by Capitalists. I want a world where Capital serves Labor instead of Labor serving Capital. I would like a more equitable society.

I am not a Market Socialist. However, insofar as Market Socialism is more near term to be realistically achievable, I would make moves to establish that kind of society before the harder transition to Socialism (Proper) can be addressed or undertaken.

u/orbat · 1 pointr/geek

If Apollo tech geekery is your thing, the book Digital Apollo is a really interesting look at the human-machine interface of the moon missions

u/sreguera · 1 pointr/space

If you want to spend some money in a book: Digital Apollo.

u/omla · 1 pointr/AskReddit
u/thetrueonion · 1 pointr/books

It's not one of these ebooks. It's just a different book about NASA. So it's also not free, unfortunately. But still a great book!

http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Apollo-Human-Machine-Spaceflight/dp/0262516101

I got this book from randomly reading an online reddit post, so I'll spread the word myself.

u/ger_guy · 1 pointr/technology

Journey to the moon, excellent book

u/celticwhisper · 1 pointr/privacy

Try this one: http://www.amazon.com/Nothing-Hide-Tradeoff-between-Security/dp/0300172338

It's not about any particular technology, but it helps debunk one of the most baseless but infuriatingly-prevalent misconceptions about privacy: that being that "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide."

u/WizardSmokingPipe · 1 pointr/HistoriansAnswered

There are many stories in Russian about this. But you should probably find a Timotheos Tsuladis book on this topic.
https://www.amazon.com/Forsaken-American-Tragedy-Stalins-Russia/dp/0143115421

u/TheCIASellsDrugs · 1 pointr/gambling

I'm familiar with the gambler's fallacy. I was referring to either some sort of cheating device being employed by the house to increase the incidence of the zero hitting, or a mechanically biased wheel.

https://www.amazon.com/Eudaemonic-Pie-Bizarre-Physicists-Computer/dp/1504040694?tag=duckduckgo-d-20

http://graphics.cs.columbia.edu/courses/mobwear/resources/thorp-iswc98.pdf

u/bincat · 1 pointr/privacy

I think it's important to not swing between two extremes - "nothing to hide" and "tor only". It's not all-or-nothing situation; different situations call for different levels of privacy.

One of the issues in the Information age is nothing is ever forgotten, information stays around in the servers and becomes searchable. How many risks would you take talking about the controversial subject if it is automatically linked to your Real Identity and practically unforgettable?

Here's analogy we can try - people can start different businesses, but one of the options they have is that they can start a LLC so they don't have to be personally liable. What would happen if structures like LLCs are discontinued and all businesses have to have owners who in the end have to assume liability with personal assets? I think you know what I am getting at.

"I got nothing to hide" is probably a fallacy and a misplaced trust in human nature especially when it comes to using power, be it commercial or governmental. This argument is mostly used when talked about unwarranted surveillance in which case the point should be that tracking people unsuspected of a crime is a wrong thing to do under any circumstances and not having anything to hide does not make the surveillance ok.
Further reading: http://www.amazon.com/dp/0300172311/

In general, I think the anonymity or very least using aliases has done very well for reddit. The discussion has been frank and let many people discuss subjects that otherwise they would have not been able to although at the same time kicking up youthful hubris here and there but nothing like unpalatable levels or 4chan.

u/ginger_beer_m · 1 pointr/AskUK

A lot of great suggestions here.. I'd just like to recommend this book as something you might enjoy reading :

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Geek-Atlas-Places-Science-Technology/dp/0596523203

u/8763456890 · 0 pointsr/pics

The Forsaken It's about what happened to Americans who emigrated to Russia during the 1930s. Mostly they died in gulags. A good read.

u/MDLTG · 0 pointsr/IAmA

I would also recommend reading Daniel Solove's book, Nothing to Hide. It makes a persuasive argument about how you shouldn't have to give up privacy for more security.

u/gngl · 0 pointsr/todayilearned

> "It was the most accurate landing to that point in history."

Given the fact that the descent was uncontrolled, this was a mere coincidence. Generally, people have sucked at controlling spacecrafts manually since the very beginnings of spaceflight, and will continue to do so. (I'd like to remind you of the fine book Digital Apollo at this point.)