W. Daniel Hillis

The head of Disney's Imagineering Works dissects the workings of computer logic and breaks it down into simple procedures, clarifying, for the computer illiterate, what makes a computer tick, and discusses exciting developments available today.

The Simple Ideas that Make Computers Work

The Pattern on the Stone

The Pattern on the Stone (Science Masters)

Most people are baffled by how computers work and assume that they will never understand them. What they don't realize—and what Daniel Hillis's short book brilliantly demonstrates—is that computers' seemingly complex operations can be broken down into a few simple parts that perform the same simple procedures over and over again. Computer wizard Hillis offers an easy-to-follow explanation of how data is processed that makes the operations of a computer seem as straightforward as those of a bicycle.Avoiding technobabble or discussions of advanced hardware, the lucid explanations and colorful anecdotes in The Pattern on the Stone go straight to the heart of what computers really do. Hillis proceeds from an outline of basic logic to clear descriptions of programming languages, algorithms, and memory. He then takes readers in simple steps up to the most exciting developments in computing today—quantum computing, parallel computing, neural networks, and self-organizing systems.Written clearly and succinctly by one of the world's leading computer scientists, The Pattern on the Stone is an indispensable guide to understanding the workings of that most ubiquitous and important of machines: the computer.

The Simple Ideas That Make Computers Work

The Pattern On The Stone

G. L. Steele

Fine-grained Parallel Symbolic Processing

Connection Machine Lisp

Describes a new kind of computer which involves parallel processing and hundreds of small microprocessors with individually integrated memories, and discusses the LISP programming language, data structures, and storage allocation.

W. Daniel Hillis

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