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Traces the remarkable, almost surreptitious rise of software in the post-war years, through a series of narrative accounts of the people and projects that produced breakthroughs over the years. Software wizards perform that magic, bridging the gap between man and machine. Programming is a form of creativity in a special medium.

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GO TO traces the remarkable, almost surreptitious rise of software in the post-war years, from being little more than an afterthought to hardware to becoming what the White House recently called 'the new physical infrastructure of the information age'. Lohr explains the ascent of software through a series of narrative accounts of the people and projects that produced breakthroughs over the years from Fortran to the Internet age. The history of programming can be seen as man's efforts to change the terms of trade in man-machine commu-nication, moving the interaction further away from the machine and closer to the comprehension of ordinary human beings. It is the software wizards who performs that magic, bridging the gap for the rest of us between man and machine. Programming is a form of creativity in a special medium. Chefs work with food, artists with oil paint, booksellers with books, programmers with code.