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Ask HN: Greatest books about the history of computing

15 points by kaycebasques ↗ HN
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.

18 comments

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jonjacky
The 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

helph67
Fire 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
Dealers of lightning about Xerox parc is quite impressive
tacostakohashi
A Quarter Century of UNIX

Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier

pasttense01
Tracy Kidder.The Soul of a New Machine.

About the development of the Data General new minicomputer. Published 1982.

brudgers
The Art of Computer Programming contains a lot of computing history.

Also it is a lot of computing history.

croo
Singh 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
Brian Kernighan's newly released "UNIX: A History and a Memoir"
amyfp214
I 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
Two good ones: 1) Where Wizards Stay Up Late and 2) How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone
gaws
The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder
siamese_puff
Good book. Can be a bit dry here and there, but fascinating
cafard
The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann by Herman Goldstine.