Devouring Fungus, Tales of the Computer Age ANNOTATION
A must for anyone who's ever considered using a RAM chip as fertilizer of booting up a computer with a steel toe. Karla Jennings' humorous history of the computer age shows that no part of our world today escapes the computer's influence. Includes witty illustrations Garry Trudeau, Rich Tennant, and others.
FROM THE CRITICS
Publishers Weekly
Anyone who has ever had a day's worth of computer work vanish into a black hole will relish this assortment of anecdotes about the mysterious machines and their devotees. Freelance journalist Jennings delves into history, recalling IBM's origins, the author of the first program (Ada Byron, daughter of Lord Byron) and source of the word ``nerd'' (Dr. Seuss). There is an insider's glimpse of Silicon Valley, where ``People stop you in the street and ask for a dollar to buy a floppy.'' There are the games programmers play on users, like the accountant who searched for a water drain under the desk when a prank program led his computer to mimic a washing machine. High-tech cat and mouse is equally inventive: alerted by an unexplained charge in his user account, astrophysicist Clifford Stoll tracked down a spy ring that had gained access to Defense Department data (see Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg , nonfiction reprints below). And we're reassured that computers don't do everything well: an English-French translation program missed the point when it rendered ``Out of sight, out of mind'' as ``Blind, insane.'' The book is illustrated with cartoons by Garry Trudeau, Rich Tennant and others. (Nov.)
Library Journal
A custodian plugs his electric floor polisher into the military base mainframe to buff the computer room floor, causing the system to crash every few days. The officer in charge wisely reports to his annoyed superiors that it is simply a buffer problem. This is one of the many appealing stories, legends, and myths found in Jennings's unique history of the computer age. The author, a freelance writer and former computer illiterate, presents with humor and pathos modern-day tall tales of technoweenies, computer criminals, and viruses. One glitch is hard to overlook: Cray Supercomputer's home is Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, not Minnesota; and hackers may have heard these yarns before. Otherwise, a nice addition for public libraries whose patrons think UNIX still means harem guards.-- Joe Accardi, Triodyne Safety Information Ctr., Niles, Ill.
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