Michael Sean Mahoney was first and foremost a historian of science and technology. He came to the history, or as he preferred to say, histories of computing from a thorough background in the development of early modern science and mathematics and of modern technology. More recently he achieved a command of computer science that enabled him to present it as growing out of aspects of the work, on the one hand, of Isaac Newton, Christiaan Huygens, and René Descartes and, on the other, of Henry Ford. -- Charles Coulston Gillispie, author of Essays and Reviews in History and History of Science Even while its cultural influence spreads and develops, the computer remains a challenging enigma. It is one thing and many, a metamorphic instrument of continually growing abilities advancing on our own. We face this challenge in an historical and historiographical poverty that makes us reluctant if not unable to notice the clues leading to the questions we need to ask. In the humanities, mainly ignorant of what computing is, and so unable to say what it is for beyond clever servitude, we are largely stuck implementing deliverables and reiterating frustrations half a century old. In the essays collected here Mahoney's learned, brilliantly insightful and determined pacing at the edge of the jungle (as he put it) is paradoxically the beginning of our exodus. -- Willard McCarty, King's College London This collection of seminal essays of historian Mike Mahoney, with commentary by Thomas Haigh, rewards the reader with a superbly organized panorama of the history of modern computing, its intellectual roots, and its place in the history of technology. -- Charles E. Stenard, Ph.D. (ret. Bell Labs) Mahoney understood computer history's significance, and his writings on the subject are important. -- William Baer * Library Journal * Newcomers to Mahoney will find great value in this collection. -- M. Mounts * Choice *
