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Ask HN: What are some good books on SV / Tech industry history?

1 points by vshan ↗ HN
Hello,

Being a young person in the tech industry, I've always been fascinated by the little tidbits of history that I've come across. Are there any books / articles which offer an insight into how the industry looked like in the 80's and 90's?

3 comments

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jonjacky
'High Stakes, No Prisoners' by Charles Ferguson is very good on the early 90s and the dawn of the web. Ferguson was a government technology policy analyst who realized very early -- around 1990 -- that the web was going to be a big thing. So he started up Vermeer, which made a web site building tool that eventually became Microsoft FrontPage. Lots of period detail about tech and business in the eary 90s. Ferguson spent vast amounts of time, energy, and frustration explaining to VCs what the Internet was and trying to convince them it would be important. Lots about creating FrontPage at Vermeer with early 90s tools practices and people, then much more about the acquisition by Microsoft. Lots of vivid portraits of particular VCs, tech people, and Microsoft people.
jonjacky
Fun but also informative magazine articles from those times by well-known writers:

'The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce' by Tom Wolfe in Esquire magazine, Dec 1983, pps 346-374 about the 60s 70s and early 80s in SV: Fairchild, Intel and other companies, Willian Shockley, Gordon Moore and other people. On the web at

https://web.stanford.edu/class/e145/2007_fall/materials/noyc...

Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums, by Stewart Brand in Rolling Stone 7 Dec 1972. Stanford AI Lab and Xerox PARC in the early 70s. Also at

http://www.wheels.org/spacewar/stone/rolling_stone.html

The Suburb That Changed the World, Jaron Lanier, New Statesman 28 Aug 2011. SV in the 70s and 80s as seen by a then-young hacker remembered much later.

http://www.newstatesman.com/scitech/2011/08/silicon-valley-c...

The Guy I Almost Was, by Patrick Farley - Early 90s cyber-utopianism in SV as seen by an aspiring outsider

http://electricsheepcomix.com/almostguy/

jonjacky
'Close to the Machine' by Ellen Ullmann - a memoir about the 90s in SF and SV by a software engineer, a different view of same time, place, and kinds of people as in the Ferguson book. Also her novel 'The Bug', a fictional treatment of working in the industry in those days.