THE MAINFRAME ERA (19451964): COMPUTING CHRONICLES Book Four of Ten

A machine no one had asked for. A television network that almost didn't trust it. A company that bet its entire future on a single architecture no one had ever built before.The Mainframe Era follows computing's strangest transformation: from a wartime secret into something a business could simply buy. Watch two broke engineers sell the first commercial computer to customers who don't yet know why they need one-then watch that machine, on live national television, correctly call a presidential landslide that every professional pollster in America got wrong. Follow Grace Hopper as she convinces a skeptical industry that a computer can be taught to read something like plain English, and follow Thomas Watson Jr. as he stakes IBM's entire future on the single riskiest bet in the company's history: a computer family so ambitious it could bankrupt them if it failed.Along the way, a quiet hardware revolution replaces the vacuum tube with something smaller, cooler, and almost invisible-planting the seed of an industry not yet known by its now-famous name. And this volume finally closes the books Volume III left open: what became of Alan Turing, John von Neumann, and Konrad Zuse once the war that made them indispensable was over.Book Four of The Computing Chronicles, a ten-volume history of computers from antiquity to artificial intelligence, The Mainframe Era is the story of how, in less than twenty years, a machine nobody wanted became an industry nobody could do without.