I heard about that from On the Metal podcast a few years back. Couldn’t believe I hadn’t come across it sooner. Its really fastinating to read about computers before the internet and big tech era when the job was unglamarous and done for the love of the game. It made me sad I missed it.
Me too. That era is gone. I'm sure the spirit is here but in other fields that I don't have access to.
I kinda realized that one has to be exceptional to enjoy that spirit. Exceptional enough to only care about the content of the work, not the other things linked to it.
I'd add to this list "Not All Fairy Tales Have Happy Endings", by Ken Williams https://kensbook.com/ detailing the rise and fall of Sierra, for those curious what happened. It's obviously biased from his perspective, but I found it very honest about mistakes, and a humorous writing style that was easy to read.
Not strictly on computer history, but Cliff Stoll's "The Cuckoo's Egg" should be a good read on the historical tracking down of a 'bad guy' hacker by the author.
Oh, I remember reading this (Estonian translation) as a teenager. First time it dawned to me that the world of computers can actually be kind of scary or even dangerous, and yet so compelling... Nice reminder, thanks!
I guess I will do some procrastination reading @CliffStoll's posts on HN right now.
+1, really enjoyed that book. I had recently read the Illuminatus! trilogy and was really amused to find the hacker named himself after one of the characters from the books.
More Jimmy Maher, beyond The Future Was Here: <www.filfre.net>. He and Chet at CRPG Addict are doing the two most important computer-game projects, each for more than a decade.
The Friendly Orange Glow, about PLATO. Not because PLATO was super-influential on the later industry—far from it, with only minor exceptions—but that doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve examination.
“Becoming Steve Jobs” is a much better book than Isaacson’s lazy effort.
I wish someone would write more about Univacy, CDC, and Cray big iron. “A Few Good Men From Univac” and “Supermen” are fine books, but not exactly comprehensive the way the IBM 360/370 books are.
You might like the book "When computers went to sea", which discusses the Naval Tactical Data System (NTDS) in detail. Univac plays a big part in this and Cray has a smaller part. The NTDS was a huge project in the 1950s and 1960s to build shipboard computers for command and control, networked between ships to provide a unified view of the battlefield. Despite its success, NTDS is pretty much forgotten now.
If anyone else is interested in the IBM books you mentioned, they are (I presume) "IBM's Early Computers" and "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems", both extremely detailed.
I need to get my act together and get this collection on-line but here is a link that has images pre-microprocessor computers. There are 3 images of books one has some a picture of a "Typical Midcourse Navigation-Guidance Profile"
As another interested party, there's almost enough CDC info out there to write a technical history - documents, interviews, software and even emulator(s). Sadly, the CDC generation is beginning to pass away, though.
It's a fascinating story, really. How CDC rose to dreaded IBM rival in only a few years, then spent the next two decades failing. Even after a single decade (1974ish) it was pretty obvious where it was going - if not for the peripherals business keeping them somewhat relevant for a while longer.
How about What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry? A vivid history of Silicon Valley which is interesting to read.
I've read (most of) this one. It is extremely well-researched but often a little too dry and academic for my taste. _Dormouse_ is more accessible, but both are great for Engelbart nerds.
I'm reading The Dream Machine now (just got to the part about PARC), and I agree, it's very good, especially in its descriptions of the social and cultural aspects of the innovations that led to personal computing. The recent Stripe Press reissue [1] includes some of J.C.R. Licklider's writings at the end, a nice bonus.
Crypto is a great read. Seeing cryptography progress from something that only spooks care about to technology vital for the commercial internet is covered really well and you also get to learn a little about the characters involved.
Masters of Doom seems overrated. Jimmy Maher wrote the following about it in a comment on one of his posts:
> It strikes me that Masters of Doom, while entertaining and well-written, suffers from being drawn virtually entirely from interviews conducted by a credulous author with no experience in game development or knowledge of the games industry, which allows hyperbole like this to sneak in.
Unix: A History and a Memoir by Kernighan is really good.
There's a lot of fun historical information and anecdotes. But, since our modern systems still have a lot of Unix ideas at their roots, I also came away with a better understanding of how to use today's systems.
This book provided me a real appreciation for the innovative concepts the original UNIX developers came up with so many years ago. Their impact cannot be overstated.
Highly recommended read for anyone who happens to spend their time plotting away in a terminal.
I don't have any specific recommendations, but it would also be nice to include books on the mathematicians (like Alan Turing) that laid the foundations for computer science.
Mine are different in that they're intended to make you feel like you were a part of it, and didn't know how it ended. Therefore, they're fiction set in the reality that was the Xerox Star and the birth of computer networking. I was there.
I picked up a copy at Borders and read it over a summer. Fantastic. I still have my copy.
"Code" by Charles Petzold, 2000
There's a new edition as of 2022. I love Petzold's writing. If you did anything Win32 at the end of the 90s you probably did too.
"In the Beginning... was the Command Line." Neal Stephenson, 1999
I remember this book being fun to read. It was the time when acolytes of Stallman ran amok and Windows was doomed to perish leaving Linux to inherit the world.
> I remember this book being fun to read. It was the time when acolytes of Stallman ran amok and Windows was doomed to perish leaving Linux to inherit the world.
Maybe I was more pessimistic, but I remember that era as waiting for the hammer to fall: Microsoft was becoming more powerful, bringing more and more hardware under its effective sway, with Linux drivers being either nonexistent or only working on a subset of what was out there. It was an era of Winmodems ("modems" that were crappy sound cards that hooked up to a phone line, with all of the modem functionality being done in the Windows-only driver) and "Linux on Laptops" being more theory than practice. Heck, a common way to get WiFi was NDISWrapper, which ran a Windows driver in a "container" of some kind because it wasn't feasible to reverse-engineer the hardware and do it right.
And later there was Palladium, and the spectrum of boot signing locking out all non-Windows OSes forever, on pains of legal prosecution.
It was really the era of "Linux on the Desktop" - for some reason everyone assumed the war would be fought there, on the desktop, against Windows 98 and successors.
But Linux just absolutely destroyed everyone and everything in the server world which became huge with the explosion of the WWW. And servers just needed a CPU, memory, disk, and an ethernet card.
I agree that Linux crushed it on the server platforms, but it got better for Linux on the desktop, too: Linux users now have multiple companies specializing in selling computers with Linux pre-installed, staking their brands on the idea that Linux will work well on those systems, as opposed to "it runs but don't expect hibernation to function and you'll need NDISWrapper for WiFi" or some similar list of caveats which always seemed to accompany Linux on most systems where the hardware wasn't hand-picked.
Even Office formats have gotten friendlier, going from explicitly MS-specific stuff like .doc to the Office Open XML file formats, which are, if not easy to parse, at least not the serialization format of a proprietary program.
And, of course, every web browser that's worth a damn treats Linux as a first-class platform. That matters more now than it did in the past.
The world could definitely improve. However, compared to the darkest fantasies someone could reasonably entertain during Ballmer-era Microsoft, we're doing pretty damn good.
The main difference is that everyone basically thought you had to win the desktop to “win” - nobody foresaw the real application of the Internet and mobile phones (Linux as Android helped quite a bit).
Some credit is also due to Mac - if you support windows and Mac via one of the cross-platform toolkits you often get Linux “for free” or close to it.
Security Yearbook 2022, the only history of the IT security industry. There are great books on encryption of course, and many books on attacks (SandWorm, Zero Day), but this book tracks the development of the companies that make the products.
For the last few years I've been collecting computer history books that I get at used book stores. Unfortunately, I have more just collected than read them, but I did read and enjoy Steve Jobs and the NeXT Big Thing and Gates: How Microsoft's Mogul...
Steve Jobs & the Next Big is a great read with tons of context about the tech world at the end of the 80’s/beginning of the 90s. Also, a candid view on Jobs’ reality distortion field.
Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe by George Dyson [1] [2] is quite a read. The brilliance of John von Neumann is on full display, not least his brilliance in gathering amazingly talented people for one of the most ambitious projects ever--the creation of a stored-program computer--and creating the kind of community and sense of purpose that scarcely exists in our current world of commercialized technology.
97 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 162 ms ] threadI kinda realized that one has to be exceptional to enjoy that spirit. Exceptional enough to only care about the content of the work, not the other things linked to it.
"Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft", Zachary, G. Pascal, https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1416925
"Dealers of Lightning: XEROX-PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age", Hiltzik, Michael, https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/56563823-dealers-of-ligh...
I guess I will do some procrastination reading @CliffStoll's posts on HN right now.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/23_(film)
I've discovered the wonderful Cuckoo's Egg much later, and I was so delighted to see the 'other side' of the movie's story
More Jimmy Maher, beyond The Future Was Here: <www.filfre.net>. He and Chet at CRPG Addict are doing the two most important computer-game projects, each for more than a decade.
The Friendly Orange Glow, about PLATO. Not because PLATO was super-influential on the later industry—far from it, with only minor exceptions—but that doesn't mean that it doesn't deserve examination.
I wish someone would write more about Univacy, CDC, and Cray big iron. “A Few Good Men From Univac” and “Supermen” are fine books, but not exactly comprehensive the way the IBM 360/370 books are.
If anyone else is interested in the IBM books you mentioned, they are (I presume) "IBM's Early Computers" and "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems", both extremely detailed.
Here is a link to some RECOMP-III which is a repurposed ICBM guidance computer being used as a general interactive computer.
https://archive.org/details/bitsavers_autoneticstingMan1963_...
I need to get my act together and get this collection on-line but here is a link that has images pre-microprocessor computers. There are 3 images of books one has some a picture of a "Typical Midcourse Navigation-Guidance Profile"
https://www.icloud.com/sharedalbum/#B0YGI9HKKGuamw1
It's a fascinating story, really. How CDC rose to dreaded IBM rival in only a few years, then spent the next two decades failing. Even after a single decade (1974ish) it was pretty obvious where it was going - if not for the peripherals business keeping them somewhat relevant for a while longer.
I’ve searched for every Engelbart-related book I can find, and this has been my favorite by far.
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0804738718/ref=nosim...
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Where-Wizards-Stay-Up...
"Fire in the Valley" a good history of the Silicon Valley through the original PC boom.
"Exploding the Phone" a history of phone phreaking.
"Shareware Heroes" a history of the shareware scene in the 80s and 90s.
Code by Charles Petzold is mostly not about history, but it uses a lot of computing history as part of the way it teaches.
Microserfs is fiction but captures what it feels like to work in the Bay Area imo.
[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine
And related, the HOPL proceedings, the first at https://dl.acm.org/doi/book/10.1145/800025 and the rest at https://dl.acm.org/conference/hopl/proceedings , finally freely available.
Luckily (for now) it's on archive.org https://archive.org/details/programminglangu00unse
> It strikes me that Masters of Doom, while entertaining and well-written, suffers from being drawn virtually entirely from interviews conducted by a credulous author with no experience in game development or knowledge of the games industry, which allows hyperbole like this to sneak in.
[1]: https://www.filfre.net/2020/05/the-shareware-scene-part-3-th...
There's a lot of fun historical information and anecdotes. But, since our modern systems still have a lot of Unix ideas at their roots, I also came away with a better understanding of how to use today's systems.
Highly recommended read for anyone who happens to spend their time plotting away in a terminal.
Mine are different in that they're intended to make you feel like you were a part of it, and didn't know how it ended. Therefore, they're fiction set in the reality that was the Xerox Star and the birth of computer networking. I was there.
I picked up a copy at Borders and read it over a summer. Fantastic. I still have my copy.
"Code" by Charles Petzold, 2000
There's a new edition as of 2022. I love Petzold's writing. If you did anything Win32 at the end of the 90s you probably did too.
"In the Beginning... was the Command Line." Neal Stephenson, 1999
I remember this book being fun to read. It was the time when acolytes of Stallman ran amok and Windows was doomed to perish leaving Linux to inherit the world.
Maybe I was more pessimistic, but I remember that era as waiting for the hammer to fall: Microsoft was becoming more powerful, bringing more and more hardware under its effective sway, with Linux drivers being either nonexistent or only working on a subset of what was out there. It was an era of Winmodems ("modems" that were crappy sound cards that hooked up to a phone line, with all of the modem functionality being done in the Windows-only driver) and "Linux on Laptops" being more theory than practice. Heck, a common way to get WiFi was NDISWrapper, which ran a Windows driver in a "container" of some kind because it wasn't feasible to reverse-engineer the hardware and do it right.
And later there was Palladium, and the spectrum of boot signing locking out all non-Windows OSes forever, on pains of legal prosecution.
It's much better now, even in the x86 world.
But Linux just absolutely destroyed everyone and everything in the server world which became huge with the explosion of the WWW. And servers just needed a CPU, memory, disk, and an ethernet card.
Even Office formats have gotten friendlier, going from explicitly MS-specific stuff like .doc to the Office Open XML file formats, which are, if not easy to parse, at least not the serialization format of a proprietary program.
And, of course, every web browser that's worth a damn treats Linux as a first-class platform. That matters more now than it did in the past.
The world could definitely improve. However, compared to the darkest fantasies someone could reasonably entertain during Ballmer-era Microsoft, we're doing pretty damn good.
Some credit is also due to Mac - if you support windows and Mac via one of the cross-platform toolkits you often get Linux “for free” or close to it.
* Fumbling the Future: How Xerox Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer
* Steve Jobs & the Next Big Thing (covers NeXT, and a little bit of Sun history)
Go To by Steve Lohr
[1] https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/44425/turings-cathe...
[2] NY Times review: https://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/06/books/review/turings-cath... Archived: https://archive.ph/p78bK
Interview with *Turing Cathedral* author George Dyson - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4824897 - Nov 2012 (1 comment)
Only the Paranoid Survive By Andrew Grove
Computer Power and Human Reason: From Judgment to Calculation by Joseph Weizenbaum
I'm the guy that wrote https://siliconfolklore.com/internet-history/ so that gives a bit of context to my recommendations.