Includes bibliographical references (pages 174-179) and index
Priest walks into the C.E.O.'s office : November 1949, the meeting between Father Roberto Busa, S.J. and Thomas J. Watson, Sr. of IBMOracle on 57th street : 1948-1952, the IBM SSEC large-scale calculator, representations of computing, and the role of the adjacent possible -- The mother of all humanities computing demos : June 27, 1952, the first public demo of Busa's and Tasman's punched-card method of "literary data processing" at IBM world headquarters, New York -- Centers of activity : 1954-1956, the founding of CAAL, the first literary data processing center, in Gallarate, Italy -- Computing philology : 1957-1959, the Dead Sea Scrolls: "a quality leap and new dimensions."