Computers

Tom Nicholas | Winter 2020

The American method of high-risk, potentially high-reward investments has fueled innovation from New England whaling ventures to Silicon Valley start-ups such as Apple, Intel, Cisco, and Google.

Venture capital (VC) is largely an American invention. It is a “hits” business where exceptional payoffs from a few investments in a large portfolio of startup companies compensate for the vast majority that yield mediocre returns or simply fail.

Grace Hopper, Computer Pioneer

Rachel Swaby |

Every time we call a computer glitch a bug, we should give a little nod to the “Grand Lady of Software.” Because if it wasn’t for Grace Hopper and the moth she found wedged in the hulking Mark II computer’s relay, the computer bug might have been known by any other name.

The Myth of the Paperless Office

Frederick E. Allen | November/December 2002

AND WHY YOURS IS MESSIER THAN EVER

IN 1970 THE FUTURIST Alvin Toffler proclaimed that “making paper copies of anything is a primitive use of machines and violates their very spirit.” Five years later the head of Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center began to see the paperless office on the horizo

American Heritage Online

Richard F. Snow | July/August 1995

From the start, I resented computers even more than most people who have been bushwhacked by them in middle age.

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Featured Authors

Ambrose, Stephen E.

Stephen E. Ambrose (1936-2002) was a historian and professor who wrote on military history, presidential history, and American expansion and foreign policy. Ambrose has been praised for his biographies of Presidents Eisenhower and Nixon, and for helping to galvanize interest in World War II.

Atkinson, Rick

Rick Atkinson is the author of dozens of best-selling books on American military history, including The Long Gray Line, a narrative saga about the West Point class of 1966; Crusade, a narrative history of the Persian Gulf War, and In the Company of Soldiers, an account of his time with General David H. Petraeus and the 101st Airborne Division during the invasion of Iraq in 2003. He has also written a three-part narrative history of the U.S.

Bird, Kai

Kai Bird is a historian and Executive Director of Leon Levy Center for Biography at the City University of New York. He is best known for writing about the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Vietnam War, US-Middle East relations and biographies of political figures. Bird is the author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize, and The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, a New York Times bestseller. His most recent book is The Outlier: The Unfinished Presidency of Jimmy Carter.

Blight, David W.

David W. Blight is the Class of 1954 Professor of American History and Director of the Gilder Lehrman Center for the Study of Slavery, Resistance & Abolition at Yale University. Recently, Blight has written A Slave No More: Two Men Who Escaped to Freedom, Including Their Narratives of Emancipation, and Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory, which won the Bancroft Prize, the Abraham Lincoln Prize, and the Frederick Douglass Prize.

Brands, H. W.

H. W. Brands is a best-selling author, historian, and the Jack S. Blanton Sr. Chair at the University of Texas at Austin. He has written thirty books, including The Zealot and the Emancipator, a dual biography of the abolitionist John Brown and President Abraham Lincoln, as well as The First American and Traitor to His Class, both finalists for the Pulitzer Prize and the Los Angeles Times Prize.