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Ask HN: Greatest books about the history of computing
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.
- pasttense01 2y agoTracy Kidder.The Soul of a New Machine. About the development of the Data General new minicomputer. Published 1982.
- syndicatedjelly 2y agoQuick plug for my HN book club on that book! We just finished Ch 1 of The Dream Machine, if you’re interested in joining. https://discord.gg/9tgxgg3J https://discord.gg/9tgxgg3J
- jonjacky 2y agoThe 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281
- BOOSTERHIDROGEN 2y agoAre there any books about the semiconductor industry?
- helph67 2y agoFire 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.
- aristofun 2y agoDealers of lightning about Xerox parc is quite impressive
- tacostakohashi 2y agoA Quarter Century of UNIX Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier
- brudgers 2y agoThe Art of Computer Programming contains a lot of computing history. Also it is a lot of computing history.
- croo 2y agoSingh 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.
- netfortius 2y agoBrian Kernighan's newly released "UNIX: A History and a Memoir"
- amyfp214 2y agoI 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.
- bwh2 2y agoTwo good ones: 1) Where Wizards Stay Up Late and 2) How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone
- wilburm 2y agoTuring’s Cathedral The Universal Computer Computer Connections: https://computerhistory.org/blog/computer-history-museum-license-agreement-for-the-kildall-manuscript/ https://computerhistory.org/blog/computer-history-museum-lic...
- dark__paladin 2y agoChip War - Chris Miller
- gaws 2y agoThe Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
- siamese_puff 2y agoGood book. Can be a bit dry here and there, but fascinating
- rfarley04 2y agoThe 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_Theory,_a_Flood https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information:_A_History,_a_...
- cafard 2y agoThe Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann by Herman Goldstine.