4 ms·
Ask HN: What's a good history of technology book?
I have read a few tangential books
- The Information
- What does technology want
- Robot Mere machine to transcend mind
- Zero
and a bunch of other books in the realm, most of them are to some extent philosophical which I really enjoy.
But I am looking for a book that takes a more hardcore historical approach and kind of takes us trough
- eugman 8y agoCode by Charles Petzold is an in depth history of programming. Very good book.
- arnold_palmur 8y agoThis is an excellent book that I recommend to many people. It literally goes from how you would use a flash light to send signals and communicate to the JVM and everything in between.
- hcrisp 8y agoIn my "History of Technology" course in college we read, "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. More of a journalist's history of how a team built a new computer.
- ThomPete 8y agoDoes it go through the history of the things they use to build it with or is it more a technical account?
- hcrisp 8y agoIt has both, but more of the personal interest side. A good study of the culture at Data General and mileu of computing at the time. Kidder did a good job of explaining it to his audience when computers were still very new. He won a Pulitzer for it.
- iends 8y agoThe Innovators by Walter Isaacson (early computing history) Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner (specifically the internet)
- pro_zac 8y ago"The Idea Factory" while focused on Bell Labs, gives a pretty broad history of the birth of digital electronics and the start of everything from digital encoding of data to cellular networks and satellite communication.
- ArtWomb 8y agoReal hardcore, I'd delve into archives of technical publications from Bell Labs, Berkeley Lab, etc. https://commons.lbl.gov/display/itdivision/Berkeley+Lab+Publications+Management https://commons.lbl.gov/display/itdivision/Berkeley+Lab+Publ... https://archive.org/details/bstj-archives https://archive.org/details/bstj-archives This report from BBN is a pretty great example of the level of detail and insider history that can be discovered. I really wish there was more stuff like this extant. http://walden-family.com/bbn/bbn-print2.pdf http://walden-family.com/bbn/bbn-print2.pdf Youtube is of course an endless treasure trove as well. From The MIT Vault is a bit of a time machine unto itself. And you can always find the random Netscape Communicator conference keynote from 1997 with a young Marc Andreessen. As well as oral histories and product demos like "RAND Corp presents the Graphics Rocket!" on the Computer History Museum channel ;) https://www.youtube.com/user/FromTheVaultofMIT https://www.youtube.com/user/FromTheVaultofMIT https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos On the softcore front. I am thinking of revisiting Daniel Boorstin's "Knowledge Trilogy". Completely out of vogue in our age of Taleb, Hariri and Gladwell. Probably chock full of cringe inducing corniness. But I remember loving the vivid writing style as a kid.
- josquindesprez 8y agoConquering the Electron: The Geniuses, Visionaries, Egomaniacs, and Scoundrels Who Built Our Electronic Age. It's a history of electronic invention over the past 150 years. Not the best from a historiographical point of view, but very insightful for getting inside of the minds of those who developed the technology, and getting a sense of the tech itself, the mental steps required to invent it, and the personalities of those involved.
- rchaud 8y agoYou might be interested in "Losing the Signal", a book about BlackBerry's rise and fall by Globe & Mail Journalists. It starts with Mike Lazaridis (the main BB engineer) adventures in repairing electronics in shop class in the '70s, to developing a lot of the communications technology necessary to launch the BB push email service.
- ebcode 8y agoTry "Asimov's Chronology of Science and Discovery". It goes year-by-year through each major scientific discovery up until the mid 1980s, when it was written. Highly enjoyable.
- dasmoth 8y agoJohn D. Clark's "Ignition!: An Informal History of Liquid Rocket Propellants" is back in print as of a few months ago, and pretty readable overall (but does venture into some of the less travelled corners of chemistry as well...) For computer stuff, Tracey Kidder's "The Soul of a New Machine" is one of my favourites.