Go to: Superheroes of Software Programming from Fortran to the Internet Age and Beyond (Paperback)

Those of us with an interest in programming stretching back to before the PC will know of most of the people Lohr covers in Go To. Giants are thin on the ground in any field and you can count those in programming without taking your socks off. Many of the stories and anecdotes will also be familiar to older programmers. Younger enthusiasts might be surprised at the role chance played in the creation of programming tools which seem to have always existed--like Unix and C. But what comes across most strongly, to paraphrase Churchill, is the debt so many owe to so few. The modern armies of programmers follow in the footsteps of a handful of visionaries.

Go To provides a perspective on one of the youngest of mankinds' world-changing endeavours. It shows us how far we've come in a remarkably short time but also shows the view from mountains we've climbed is simply larger mountains waiting to be scaled. The next 60 years should be even more interesting. This is entertaining and thought-provoking reading from Pulitzer-winner Steve Lohr. --Steve Patient

Review
The history of computer software, told by a senior technology writer for the "New York Times". Software arose after WWII along with the first computers. Early programming was handled by squads of technicians, mostly young women, who custom-wired early machines such as ENIAC for each new calculation. Then John von Neumann, a mathematician working for the Manhattan Project, postulated the idea of a "stored program," permanent instructions built into the machine. This concept allowed engineers to build a general-purpose contraption into which programmers could feed instructions on punch cards or paper tape for specific tasks. The next step came in the mid-1950s, when an IBM team led by John Backus created Fortran. A strange blend of shorthand and math that allowed ordinary users to write programs, Fortran (a contraction of "formula translator") opened the door to almost everything that has followed. Lohr profiles the members of Backus's team and gives a taste of how the language works. He follows the same formula with other languages from Cobol (designed as a business applications language) to Unix (which led the way to non-mainframe computing). BASIC taught millions of ordinary users the rudiments of programming on simple home machines. Later, the software emphasis shifted to applications: word processors, spreadsheets, and database managers. A more sophisticated generation of home users now happily program in Java and HTML. Today's frontier is the Open Source movement, whose adherents tinker with the code of such software as Linux. The rhetoric of open source is revolutionary, with the likes of Microsoft as the class enemy, but the battle is far from over. Stay tuned. A clear and colorful look at the people and programs that have shaped the computer era. (Kirkus Reviews)

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