A History of Modern Computing

Ceruzzi's textbook became the standard academic reference for the history of computing from the 1940s through the early internet era. As a curator at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, he had direct access to the machines and the people who built them, which gives the book a materiality that purely intellectual histories lack. The narrative moves from ENIAC and UNIVAC through the minicomputer revolution, the microprocessor, the personal computer, and the emergence of networking, treating each transition not as inevitable progress but as a series of contingent choices made by specific institutions under specific pressures. Ceruzzi is particularly strong on the business and organizational dimensions — how IBM's decisions shaped an industry, how the minicomputer created new kinds of companies, how software became a separate commodity. The second edition, published in 2003, remains useful as a foundation even though it predates the smartphone era and the cloud.