Exploring the strange and hazy days before nerds ruled the earth, tech writer Steve Lohr's Go To is a great introduction to the softer side of the information age. Sure, he covers the Microsoft and Apple stories, but he also digs deeply to learn how Fortran and Cobol were developed and ventures into the open-source world. Lohr is adept at personalizing the process of software development, which serves to make some of the business and technical decisions more comprehensible to the lay reader.

Exploring the strange and hazy days before nerds ruled the earth, tech writer Steve Lohr's Go To is a great introduction to the softer side of the information age. Sure, he covers the Microsoft and Apple stories, but he also digs deeply to learn how Fortran and Cobol were developed and ventures into the open-source world. Lohr is adept at personalizing the process of software development, which serves to make some of the business and technical decisions more comprehensible to the lay reader.

IBM conducted yearly employee reviews called the "Performance Improvement Program," or Pip, for short. The Pip, like most such programs today, followed a rigid formula, with numbers and rankings. [John] Backus decided the Pip system was ill-suited for measuring the performance of his programmers, so his approach was to mostly ignore it. One afternoon, for example, he called Lois Haibt over for a chat. He talked about her work, said she had been doing an excellent job and then pushed a small piece of paper across the desk saying, "This is your new salary," a pleasing raise, as Haibt recalled. As she got up to leave, Backus mentioned in passing, "In case anyone should ask, this was your Pip."

Since he starts early in the history of the field, Lohr gets to share some of the oddities of the days before programming was professionalized. Developers were kids, musicians, game experts, and practically anyone who showed an interest. Many readers will be surprised and delighted to read of the strong recruitment of women and their many contributions to software development--an aspect of geek history that has long been neglected. Go To should break down a few preconceptions while building up a new respect for the coders who guided us into the 21st century. --Rob Lightner.

Acknowledgments

1 Introduction

The Rise of Software and the Programming Art

2 FORTRAN:

The Early "Turning Point"

3 The Hard Lessons of the Sixties:

From Exuberance to the Realities of COBOL

and the IBM 360 Project

4 Breaking Big Iron's Grip

Unix and C

5 Programming for the Millions:

The BASIC Story from Dartmouth toVisual Basic

6 The European Influence:

From Algol to Pascal to C++

7 A Computer of My Own:

The Beginning of the PC Industry and the Story of Word

8 Computing for the Masses:

The Long Road to "Gooey" and the Macintosh

9 Programming for Everyman

Just Let the Users Do It

10 Java:

The Messy Birth of a New Language

11 There Has To Be a BetterWay:

Apache and the Open Source Movement

Afterword

Notes

References

Index