There aren't many books about this. Instead there are papers that describe historic systems at particular points in time, or describe (part of) the history of

There aren't many books about this. Instead there are papers that describe historic systems at particular points in time, or describe (part of) the history of a particular system. For programming languages, the canonical papers appeared in the three History of Programming Languages (HOPL) conferences: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Programming_Languag... For Unix and C history, start with Dennis Ritchie's page (scroll down to Unix papers): https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/ For the Internet, there is this review of classic papers on the Internet and some alternatives: http://named-data.net/publications/main/ http://named-data.net/publications/main/ There are also some popular books on Internet history - a good one is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner and Mathew Lyon. You might find something interesting among these links on computing history: http://jon-jacky.github.io/home/links.html#history http://jon-jacky.github.io/home/links.html#history and Unix/Linux history (scroll down to Unix heritage society): http://jon-jacky.github.io/home/links.html#linux http://jon-jacky.github.io/home/links.html#linux still more here about Unix and other systems: http://jon-jacky.github.io/home/links.html#design-examples http://jon-jacky.github.io/home/links.html#design-examples Historical descriptions of a few influential systems and many obscure ones: https://github.com/jon-jacky/Piety/blob/master/doc/precursors.md https://github.com/jon-jacky/Piety/blob/master/doc/precursor...