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Ask HN: What's a good history of technology book?

23 points by ThomPete ↗ HN
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

12 comments

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eugman
Code by Charles Petzold is an in depth history of programming. Very good book.
arnold_palmur
This 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
In 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
Does it go through the history of the things they use to build it with or is it more a technical account?
hcrisp
It 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
The Innovators by Walter Isaacson (early computing history)

Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner (specifically the internet)

pro_zac
"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
Real hardcore, I'd delve into archives of technical publications from Bell Labs, Berkeley Lab, etc.

https://commons.lbl.gov/display/itdivision/Berkeley+Lab+Publ...

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

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/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
Conquering 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
You 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
Try "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
John 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.