The Modern History of Computing (2006)

Glancing at the bibliography, I notice that the author of this article, B. Jack Copeland, also wrote a book entitled Alan Turing's Automatic Computing Engine: The Master Codebreaker's Struggle to Build the Modern Computer. It makes a little more sense in that context, using "modern computer" to mean broadly what we now thing of as a computer, i.e. an electronic, stored-program, general-purpose computer, versus previous more special-purpose and/or electromechanical computing machines.

It still reads funnily to me when phrased as "the modern history of computing", though. The book title's approach, which is more like "the history of how we got to the modern computer", makes clearer what he means.

It's a philosophy department, and they (like many of the social sciences) have pretty precise ideas what "modern" means. The 1950s is probably the latest decade that they could put into the "modern" bucket.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history which calls 1945-and-later "contemporary history".

I´m not sure. The world modern is used to name specific periods of time. Example, modern history--> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modern_history

Maybe a historian named this period as such in the history of computing.