the foundation of practical digital circuit design:

Scarce first printing of Claude Shannon's master's thesis,
one of the fundamental steps in the development of the computer

-Hermann Goldstine,

Rare first printing of Claude Shannon's famous master's thesis; through the application of Boolean algebra to relay and switching circuits, Shannon solved one of the most fundamental problems in computer design. 

In 1936, the twenty-year-old Shannon "accepted the position of research assistant in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The position allowed him to continue studying toward advanced degrees while working part-time for the department. The work in question was ideally suited to his interests and talents. It involved the operation of the Bush differential analyzer, the most advanced calculating machine of that era, which solved by analog means differential equations of up to the sixth degree. The work required translating differential equations into mechanical terms, setting up the machine and running through the needed solutions for various initial values. In some cases as many as four assistants would be needed to crank in functions by following curves during the process of solution.

Also of interest was a complex relay circuit associated with the differential analyzer that controlled its operation and involved over one hundred relays. In studying and servicing this circuit, Shannon became interested in the theory and design of relay and switching circuits. He had studied symbolic logic and Boolean algebra at Michigan in mathematics courses, and realized that this was the appropriate mathematics for studying such two-valued systems. He developed these ideas during the summer of 1937, which he spent at Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City, and, back at M.I.T., in his master's thesis, where he showed how Boolean algebra could be used in the analysis and synthesis of switching and computer circuits. The thesis, his first published paper, aroused considerable interest when it appeared in 1938 in the A.I.E.E. Transactions. In 1940 it was awarded the Alfred Noble Prize of the combined engineering societies of the United States, an award given each year to a person not over thirty for a paper published in one of the journals of the participating societies. A quarter of a century later H. H. Goldstine, in his book The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann, called this work 'one of the most important master's theses ever written... a landmark in that it helped to change digital circuit design from an art to a science'" ( N.J.A. Sloane and A.D. Wyner, Shannon's Collected Papers). Only the most minor wear to original cloth. Scarce.