The Dream Machine is giving me a great appreciation of the time-sharing revolution and ARPANET. What else should I read? Any timeframe or topic is OK, so long as it's strongly related to the history of computing.
jonjacky7 days ago
The standard textbooks by historians are:
A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi
There is a completely rewritten version of this with an additional author:
A New History of Modern Computing by Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi
Also:
Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray
There are good books by journalists and popular writers. Favorites on HN are:
The Dream Machine -- you are already reading this. Also:
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthey Lyon
These and many many other books are recomended and described in this HN thread from a few years ago:
Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281
BOOSTERHIDROGEN6 days ago
Are there any books about the semiconductor industry?
syndicatedjelly7 days ago
Quick plug for my HN book club on that book! We just finished Ch 1 of The Dream Machine, if you’re interested in joining.
rfarley043 days ago
The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick
It's a little zoomed out and more focused on information theory than computers, specifically, but the overlap is significant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information:_A_History,_a_...
brudgers6 days ago
The Art of Computer Programming contains a lot of computing history.
Also it is a lot of computing history.
wilburm5 days ago
Turing’s Cathedral
The Universal Computer
Computer Connections: https://computerhistory.org/blog/computer-history-museum-lic...
pasttense016 days ago
Tracy Kidder.The Soul of a New Machine.
About the development of the Data General new minicomputer. Published 1982.
gaws4 days ago
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
siamese_puff4 days ago
Good book. Can be a bit dry here and there, but fascinating
croo6 days ago
Singh Simon - Code book is an excellent and fantastic read about the history of cryptography and provide insights of what really drove technical improvements in ww1 and 2.
netfortius6 days ago
Brian Kernighan's newly released "UNIX: A History and a Memoir"
amyfp214a day ago
I second this. It's a wonderful read. I particularly enjoyed learning the history of various unix commands, for example, I was unfamiliar with the grep family of commands until the book explained it clearly. It also gives in more detail the tale of Ken Thompsan reverse engineering a printer firmware, CPU, and assembly language, and rewriting the entire firmware to be 1000x better, in about an hour.
cafard3 days ago
The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann by Herman Goldstine.
tacostakohashi6 days ago
A Quarter Century of UNIX
Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier
helph676 days ago
Fire in the Valley - The making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine, published by McGraw Hill, 2000 463 pages. Excellent reference telling many of the P.C stories.
aristofun6 days ago
Dealers of lightning about Xerox parc is quite impressive
bwh26 days ago
Two good ones: 1) Where Wizards Stay Up Late and 2) How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone
dark__paladin5 days ago
Chip War - Chris Miller