"...[the author] with clear prose that makes sense of a complicated subject..." --
Newsweek, 11/12/01"...a clear, understandable introduction... An excellent primer for anyone curious about the insides of a PC..." --
New York Times Book Review, 11/4/01"BASIC was an open city, Shanghai a hundred years ago. There were no laws." --
Alan Cooper, the "father" of Visual Basic"Go To is an enlightening read and does a fine job of demonstrating the power of imagination." --
Boston Globe, 12/30/01"Lohr has done his journalistic legwork here... it's not so much a book about programming as a book about programmers." --
Dr. Dobb's Journal, 2/1/02"That book I just read--was completely fascinating! Surprising, yes, but that is precisely my reaction to Go To." --
devX, 1/7/02"They took anyone who seemed to have an aptitude for problem-solving skills-bridge players, chess players, even women." --
Lois Haibt, a member of IBM's original Fortran team
--This text refers to an alternate
kindle_edition edition.
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 an alternate kindle_edition edition.
What computer programming entails seems apparent to the tens of millions with HTML coding skills, but their experience is but a superficial intimation of what hardcore programming demands. In this human-interest approach to the history of the art and engineering of software, Lohr looks at the babel of languages, from Fortran to Java, in which programmers spoke to the hardware. Since it is tedious and error-prone to converse directly with the circuits in their native tongue, programmers for the big-iron companies of the 1950s devised a system that "compiled" English-like commands (such as the title's GO TO) into digital strings the mainframe could execute. The Fortran story sets the template of Lohr's accounts of successor languages: he biographically sketches the principal programmers who conceived the languages; he succinctly describes the problem they meant to solve; and he surveys the innovations in hardware these languages were created to exploit. For the PC pilot curious about COBOL, Unix, BASIC, C++, Linux, or Java, Lohr is a made-to-order storyteller.
Gilbert TaylorCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
--This text refers to an alternate
kindle_edition 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 an alternate
kindle_edition edition.
From Library Journal
"Go to" is a programming term that refers to the ability to jump from one place in a software program to anywhere else, rather than proceeding in a strictly linear manner. It is just one of the myriad developments covered in this history of computer programming from the 1950s to the present. New York Times technology correspondent and coauthor of U.S. vs. Microsoft, Lohr begins with the development of Fortran and appropriately ends just past the creation of the decidedly nonlinear World Wide Web. He describes the conception and explosion of the Java programming language and the growth of the open-source and free software movements. One appeal of Go To lies in its coverage of unsung but pivotal programmers; Lohr emphasizes the contributions, for example, of women software pioneers beginning from the earliest days of stored-program computing. Unfortunately, this broad coverage also detracts from the readability of the narrative. Lohr describes each programmer's introduction to programming and significant contributions, yet most early experiences and motivations are similar enough that it can be difficult to keep the cast of characters straight. An optional purchase for public libraries. Rachel Singer Gordon, Franklin Park Lib., IL
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an alternate
kindle_edition edition.
About the Author
Steve Lohr is senior writer and technology correspondent for the
New York Times, and is co-author of
U.S. vs. Microsoft. He lives in New York City.
--This text refers to an alternate
kindle_edition edition.
![Go To: The Story of the Math Majors, Bridge Players, Engineers, Chess Wizards, Maverick Scientists, and Ico by [Steve Lohr]](https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/01RmK+J4pJL.gif)
