Charles Petzold



Speaking at vNext Orange County

January 25, 2013
New York, N.Y.

I am very pleased to announced that on February 12, 2013, I will be speaking at a meeting of vNext Orange County (California) beginning at 6:00 PM. Here are the details as announced by vNext:

For this talk, I had a choice of either regurgitating some stuff from my new book about Windows 8 programming or doing something special — perhaps even unique. Because I only engage in public speaking about once a year, I decided on the latter course, and here it is:

Analog vs. Digital:
Rhythms of the Natural World,
Our Struggle to Compute them,
and Windows 8

If digital technologies are so great, why do we increasingly hide digital computation under fluid and bouncy user interfaces? If analog computers are so lame, why are they also so clever, so elegant, and so fascinating? Join Charles Petzold in an exploration of analog vs. digital computation of natural processes in a talk that connects Vannevar Bush’s Differential Analyzer of the 1920s to Windows 8 and other modern user interfaces.

As some people may know, I've been poking away at an historical book about analog computing for well over a decade. I hope to make more progress on this book with the proper alignment of finances and opportunity, but until then, this is it.

This is a live event only. There will be no streaming or recording of the talk. I'll be there live, so I hope you will as well.