Stan Augarten. Bit by Bit: An Illustrated History of Computers. New York: Ticknor and Fields, 1984. This easy-to-read book will help computer novices gain an understanding of how computer technology works. It also provides a detailed history of the inventions and inventors contributing to the modern computer.

Robert V. Bruce. Alexander Graham Bell and the Conquest of Solitude. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1973. This fascinating biography of Alexander Graham Bell also provides insight into his inventions and the inspiration for many of his ideas.

N. Chomsky and M. Halle. The Sound Pattern of English. New York: Harper & Row, 1968. The distribution of sound is particular to each language. This book describes an important study on the patterns exhibited by the English language.

Elizabeth Corcoran, "Computing's Controversial Patron," Science 260. (April 2, 1993): 20 -- 22. This interesting article on recent ARPA research discusses whether ARPA technology is "too fast for its own good" and becomes obsolete as soon as it has been created.

Raymond Kurzweil, The Age of Intelligent Machines. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990. This book covers the history of artificial intelligence from its earliest philosophical and mathematical roots to computers with human-level intelligences emerging in the twenty-first century. It describes how the technology works, as well as the philosophic, economic, and social implications of machine intelligence.

Kai-Fu Lee. Automatic Speech Recognition: The Development of the SPHINX System. Boston: Kluwer, 1989. An informative book that not only details Lee's own research on ASR but also provides an overview of speech recognition systems from the 1970s and the 1980s.

William A. Martin, Kenneth W. Church, and Ramesh S. Patil. "Preliminary Analysis of a Breadth-First Parsing Algorithm: Theoretical and Experiential Results." Cambridge: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science, 1981. Church cites the "synthetic" sentence