Want to feel old? People are collecting vintage books about computers. These futuristic-feeling technologies have become such an ubiquitous part of our daily lives that it can feel counterintuitive to step back and take a look at their history, but there’s a growing interest in computer science classics that date back to the 1940s and ‘50s. In this episode, we’ll talk about books like Faster Than Thought: A Symposium on Digital Computing Machines; Giant Brains, or Machines That Think; and The Age of Intelligent Machines, as well as some science fiction novels that turned out to be uncannily prescient about the internet age. Log on and join us in cyberspace for this organically intelligent new #brattlecast.
Bonus Brattlecast - Social Distancing in the Brattle’s Basement
Like many of us, Ken is spending some time doing some long-delayed housekeeping and organizing: finding things he’d forgotten he has, and things he thought he’d lost. But, unlike many of us, he’s tidying up a basement in which 40 years of boxes containing possibly rare books have accumulated. We’ll talk about some of the treasures he’s unearthed during his Covid cleanup, and about his hopes for his most frequent customers: now that they’ve been forced to stop shopping for books, maybe they can stay home and read some of the books they already have.
