Silicon Dreams, St. Martins Press, New York, 1989 (also
available in paperback)
This is a book about the ways we represent information and the differences
between man and machine in the use and processing of bits.
It's a chatty and philosophical book with a minimum of mathematics. I've tried to weave
a layman's introduction to information theory through the book as I muse about
the mysteries of information, such as why it takes so many bits to represent
a picture and why a human being can only input about 50 bits per second. (Sorry,
but that's all we're good for!)
Read excerpt from Chapter One -- The Information Age
.
Read excerpt from Chapter Two -- Information Theory
.
Read excerpt from Chapter Three -- Information and the Evolution of Human Language
.
Read excerpt from Chapter Four -- Typing
.
Read excerpt from Chapter Five -- Speech
.
Read excerpt from Chapter Seven -- Pictures
.
Lucky Strikes Again, IEEE Press, New York, 1992
This is the complete collection my Reflections essays from IEEE Spectrum Magazine
from its inception in 1982 through September 1992. In addition, I wrote lengthy
introductions to each section of the book which are themselves very much like
the essays. I'm not including any of the content of this book on this page, but you
can click here
to read any of the newer essays that were published after this
book was printed.
"Lucky, Salz, and Weldon", McGraw-Hill, New York, 1965
Obviously, this book has a real name (Principles of Data Communications), but
I'll always remember it as Lucky, Salz, and Weldon. Anyway, it doesn't matter,
because you can't get it anymore.
This was a real research book in the early days of data communications, and
I still hear from people who have learned from it some time in the distant past.
It's kind of obsolete now, and I'm too aware of its imperfections and errors, but
all three of us are glad and proud we did it when we did.
Jack Salz has retired from Bell Labs and currently consults at Lucent. Ned Weldon is at the University of Hawaii. About every ten years we
get together and visit Sal's Tavern in Red Bank, New Jersey, where much of this
book was written.