Pieces of the action
by Vannevar Bush · first published 1970
10mentions
4recommended by
7HN commenters
2022–2026first – last mentioned
57% recommend43% neutral
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I also recommend “Pieces of the Action” by Vannevar Bush: https://press.stripe.com/pieces-of-the-action
on “Before there was Oppenheimer there was Vannevar Bush” ↗I've been reading the mentioned Bush memoir "Pieces of the Action" and it's pretty good. Stories about engineering and organizational politics. As good as any business classic (e.g. "My Years With General Motors" or "High Output Management").
on “Vannevar Bush Engineered the 20th Century” ↗Pieces of the Action is excellent. A non-autobiography autobiography. Many points in the book feature him being discreet about some name or some incident, even 20+ years on. For example, 'General Blank'early in the book,…
on “Vannevar Bush Engineered the 20th Century” ↗Thank you for all your work! I have several Stripe Press books, especially enjoyed Revolt of the Public and Pieces of the Action.
on “Flounder Mode – Kevin Kelly on a different way to do great work” ↗…were excellent complements to, and sometimes superior to, abstract symbolic representations. For this reason he and his colleagues grieved the transition to digital computing. For example, he writes in Pieces of the Action (p. 262) of "an example of how easy it is to teach fundamental calculus," about a mechanic with a high school education who learned calculus by working on the differential analyzer. "It was very interesting…
on “Building SimCity: How to put the world in a machine” ↗I want to see models of Vannevar Bush's rapid analytical machine computers supplied to the proto-NSA. See Colin Burke and Pieces of the Action
on “The Interim Computer Museum” ↗> Vannevar Bush - head of military research during WW2, author of “As We May Think” and “Science, the Endless Frontier” - wrote a memoir late in life, Pieces of the Action. It was out of print and hard to obtain for a long time, but Stripe Press has brought it back in a new edition The author of the article collected a number of excerpts grouped by topic: "On invention";…
on “Highlights from the Memoirs of Vannevar Bush” ↗…Christopher Nolan featured Vannevar Bush prominently in the recent Oppenheimer film. Stripe press published some of his writings recently as well. (I haven't read this one yet) https://press.stripe.com/pieces-of-the-action
on “Man-Computer Symbiosis (1960)” ↗…earlier version of the NSF bill written under the close influence of Vannevar Bush that actively avoided providing for this extent of executive ‘weighing of the scales’ of science. Source: Bush, V. “Pieces of the Action”, 1970
on “NSF director to resign amid grant terminations, job cuts, and controversy” ↗…device development. Vannevar would go on to defend his actions in saying that it was good that such a horrific capacity was demonstrated in such a 'spectacular' way. His words in his autobiography, "Pieces of the Action" strive to cement the legacy of his gift to the world: "The advent of the A-bomb is generally regarded as a catastrophe for civilization. I am not convinced that it was. With the pace of science in…
on “Hiroshima (1946)” ↗