Between human and machine : feedback, control, and computing before cybernetics
Mindell ponders the origin 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 environment 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
Print Book, English, 2002
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, 2002
History
xiv, 439 pages : illustrations ; 27 cm.
9780801868955, 9780801880575, 0801868955, 0801880572
47521252
A history of control systems
Naval control systems: The Bureau of Ordnance and the Ford Instrument Company
Taming the beasts of the machine age: The Sperry Company
Opening Black's box: Bell Labs and the transmission of signals
Artificial representation of power systems: Analog computing at MIT
Dress rehearsal for war: The four horsemen and Palomar
Organizing for war: The fire control divisions of the NDRC
The Servomechanisms Laboratory and fire control for the masses
Analog's finest hour
Radar and system integration at the Radiation Laboratory
Cybernetics and ideas of the digital