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Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts--The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution (Paperback)

~ (Author) "A LONE SAILBOAT IN THE DISTANCE makes its way across the ripples surface of Lake Washington in the crisp autumn dusk, famed on the horizon..." (more)
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  • This item: Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists and Iconoclasts--The Programmers Who Created the Software Revolution by Steve Lohr

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

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 --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.



From Publishers Weekly

About a year too late to take advantage of public hunger for behind-the-scenes computer biz accounts, New York Times technology correspondent Lohr's learned narrative never quite engages the reader. A series of portraits describes the unique band of outsiders who commanded the lumbering, room-sized computers of the postwar era. These men played a headache-inducing game called "blind chess," built their own stereos and could detect a computer malfunction by sound. The book kicks off in the 1950s at IBM, where several of these visionaries were trying to make the company's computers more efficient. Men like John Backus (one is tempted to call him the Henry Ford of programming) created the Fortran assembly language to automate and make the programming process more efficient. With increased business interest in computers in the late 1950s, John McCarthy, who cofounded MIT's artificial intelligence lab in 1959, initiated Cobol, or Common Business Oriented Language, to allow people to program using English. After the 1960s, software started getting more headlines from an industry and a press that previously only cared about new and faster hardware. By the 1980s, companies like Microsoft were creating business empires out of programming. For a book that claims to tell the story of the software revolution's instigators, it's frustratingly short on characterization. There's the occasional flourish, like the description of Charles Simonyi who did groundbreaking work at Xerox's PARC research facility and essentially created Microsoft Word showing up for debugging sessions in a special "debugging outfit": a black net shirt and translucent skin-tight black pants. But this account of reputed fringe visionaries lacks flash and loopiness. National author tour.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

--This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
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Product Details

  • Paperback: 264 pages
  • Publisher: Basic Books; 2001 Edition edition (October 15, 2002)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0465042260
  • ISBN-13: 978-0465042265
  • Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 5.1 x 0.7 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #805,503 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Steve Lohr
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
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A LONE SAILBOAT IN THE DISTANCE makes its way across the ripples surface of Lake Washington in the crisp autumn dusk, famed on the horizon by the skyline of Seattle. Read the first page
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Bell Labs, New York, United States, Palo Alto, Carnegie Mellon, Visual Basic, Bill Gates, San Francisco, Grace Hopper, Butler Lampson, Digital Equipment, San Jose, Stanford University, University of California, Ken Thompson, Silicon Valley, Sun Microsystems, Wall Street, Dennis Ritchie, James Gosling, Project Genie, Alan Kay, Berkeley Unix, Cambridge University, Defense Calculator
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Customer Reviews

21 Reviews
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4.1 out of 5 stars (21 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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27 of 27 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating Software History 101, November 4, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Go to: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Scientists and Iconoclasts who were the Hero Programmers of the Software Revolution (Hardcover)
For a narrative history of computer programming, from the pre-Fortran days to the present, this book does a remarkably good job. It describes in vivid, readable fashion the people, the period, and the problems they solved. It also gives the reader a real sense of the kind of creativity involved in programming, the excitement and what it takes. The book is filled with neat historical tidbits (from the origins of the term "beta" to the notes of Charles Simonyi, a Xerox PARC refugee who joined Microsoft, to Bill Gates, laying out much of that company's plans for the next 20 years). For anyone interested in software, and the extraordinary cast of characters behind the technology, this book is a clear, well-written, authorative survey. It covers a lot of ground -- and it it does it awfully well!
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44 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Good Book but Computer History Wrong, January 3, 2002
By Jean J Bartik (Oaklyn, New Jersey United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: Go to: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Scientists and Iconoclasts who were the Hero Programmers of the Software Revolution (Hardcover)
I enjoyed this book very much. It was certainly true that nobody could predict who would be a good programmers. I must confess that I picked those who were intelligent and enthusiastic. It sounds like a jungle out there.

Now for my hot buttons. Why am I not surprised that the history is wrong? It's because the author suffers from the writers' "Curse," assuming things written down are the truth. Johnny von Neumann never even saw the ENIAC until its design was fixed and the system almost built. He did consult with Dick Clippinger and his programming group from 1947/48 when they turned the ENIAC into a stored program computer. At that time, people were presenting various instruction sets for computers and von Neumann suggested a one-address code with a central accumulator architecture for the ENIAC, which we used. My group at the Moore School was under contract to do the ENIAC programming. Actually, Dick Clippinger, Adele Goldstine and I, with some help from DRs. Giese and Galbraith from Aberdeen did the actual programming.

When von Neumann saw the ENIAC, he was excited by it and, learning Pres Eckert and John Mauchly and their design team were already at work on EDVAC, the ENIAC successor, he asked if he could sit in on the meetings. The EDVAC design already included the stored-program concept. See Eckert's interview with Peter Vogt for the Smithsonian Computer History Project. After a number of meetings, von Newmann skipped some meetings to go to Las Alamos, but he sent back the article, which Pres and John took as an internal document, summarizing the content of the meetings. Other members of the team were not allowed to write or talk about it. Goldstine, who was the Security Officer distributed von Neumann's article widely. Some Security Officer. Both Goldstine and von Neumann came from the University World where publishing is used to stake out claims. Both knew exactly what they were doing. They betrayed their colleagues and continued to do so. When Pres and John applied for an EDVAC patent, they discovered that this enterprising duo had already applied. Not too many people took von Newmann seriously when he said he did it to ensure that it remained in the public domain and not used for commercial purposes. Apparently, Goldstine felt von Newmann was a better meal ticket than one from Pres and John. He was wrong. Pres and John went on to develop BINAC, the first stored program computer. Yes, it ran for 48 hours without an error in March 1949. Reported in the Franklin Institute newsletter. Then, they went on to build the first electronic commercial computer. As far as I know, nobody, other than the organizations von Newmann consulted with, ever built the Johnniac while the computer industry switched with UNIVAC to the commercial world.

I could continue on, but I know I am unfair to expect you to buck the tide. However, I am now 77 years old and I feel that someone should tell the truth, and if not me, who?

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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Technical history of system software development, December 2, 2001
By A Customer
This review is from: Go to: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Scientists and Iconoclasts who were the Hero Programmers of the Software Revolution (Hardcover)
This is a good book on the technical and intellectual development of system and utility software from Fortran days to now. It is meant to be an overview of some of the high lights of the technical developments and most interestingly the people and the players. The author purposefully does not cover application software and the huge effort and development in those areas whether in a product like Mathematica or in computational fluid dynamics programs. He certainly captures the flavor of the operating system, compiler, and utility developments that were so critical to progress in computers.

The book is strongest where the history is known. Present day developments such as Linux and open software along with the key people are discussed in the last chapter, but no one knows yet what importance will come of that, and this is left up in the air.

There are not that many books that range over the history of software development as this one does. Lohr is no gee whiz amateur; this is a solid professional job where the flavor of a development is really captured (at least in my view). One can just imagine how the development of Fortran opened up immense possibilities in simulation and modeling. Good word processors had broad applications and made life much easier for all of us. Lohr chooses his subject and enlivens it.

He discusses the people involved in many of the developments with a varying degree of detail, so we capture some of the flavor of the personalities. This is done well without giving us ranging biographies or too much psychoanalysis. This is a book well worth reading.

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Storybook of software achievements
Steve Lohr's Go To is a history of computer programming told through the experiences and accomplishments of individual programmers. Read more
Published 11 months ago by Will Engler

3.0 out of 5 stars The Good, bad and ugly
The Good
It gives you are quick and dirty preview of computing from ENIVAC right up to the dawn of Java. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Green

5.0 out of 5 stars I thoroughly enjoyed this book.
As a engineer who uses many applications in his work, it was an exciting experience to read about those indivuduals who developed the codes that resulted in these applications... Read more
Published on February 22, 2005 by Vince T

3.0 out of 5 stars Useful Chronology of Operating Systems & Langusges
The writer, a NY Times technology correspondent, provides a 250-page chronology of computer operating systems and software languages from the early post-WWII years until 2001. Read more
Published on February 13, 2005 by David Gurgel

5.0 out of 5 stars good set of bedtime stories ...
I haven't read this book cover to cover. But, I have been flipping through a few of its pages and have been jumping in and reading what seems interesting at the moment... Read more
Published on December 23, 2004 by Mahesh

4.0 out of 5 stars README
This book could have been better edited and better organized, but it is still worth reading. "GO TO" (which probably should have been called "goto" or... Read more
Published on February 13, 2004 by Nathan Moore

5.0 out of 5 stars engaging history of a difficult but important subject
This book ranks among the best in the history of technology and one of the few that specifically addresses software. Read more
Published on December 22, 2003 by gonolin

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't be so harsh!
This book isn't aimed specifically at experienced programmers, but rather at the general public. My mom could read it. Read more
Published on November 22, 2003 by Etienne Boucher

3.0 out of 5 stars interesting, not fluent
Everybody will find something of interest in this history of software engineering. I'm not much of an historian, so I particularly enjoyed learning some of the historical... Read more
Published on January 25, 2003 by Eric Johnson

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book ruined by poor editing.
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the _Universe_"?

" ... because 31 in octal is 25 in decimal." instead of " ... because OCT 31 == DEC 25"? Read more

Published on July 22, 2002 by Joseph S. Grossberg

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