How the computer became universal.Over the past fifty years, the computer has been transformed from a hulking scientific supertool and data processing workhorse, remote from the experiences of ordinary people, to a diverse family of devices that billions rely on to play games, shop, stream music and movies, communicate, and count their steps. In A New History of Modern Computing, Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi trace these changes. A comprehensive reimagining of Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing, this new volume uses each chapter to recount one such transformation, describing how a particular community of users and producers remade the computer into something new. Haigh and Ceruzzi ground their accounts of these computing revolutions in the longer and deeper history of computing technology. They begin with the story of the 1945 ENIAC computer, which introduced the vocabulary of "programs" and "programming," and proceed through email, pocket calculators, personal computers, the World Wide Web, videogames, smart phones, and our current world of computers everywhere--in phones, cars, appliances, watches, and more. Finally, they consider the Tesla Model S as an object that simultaneously embodies many strands of computing.

AcknowledgmentsBecoming Universal: Introducing A New History of Computing1. Inventing the Computer2. The Computer Becomes a Scientific Supertool3. The Computer Becomes a Data Processing Device4. The Computer Becomes a Real-Time Control System5. The Computer Becomes an Interactive Tool6. The Computer Becomes a Communications Platform7. The Computer Becomes a Personal Plaything8. The Computer Becomes Office Equipment9. The Computer Becomes a Graphical Tool10. The PC Becomes a Minicomputer11. The Computer Becomes a Universal Media Device12. The Computer Becomes a Publishing Platform13. The Computer Becomes a Network14. The Computer is Everywhere and Nowhere15. Epilogue: A Tesla in the ValleyNotesBibliographyIndex