There is a discussion on twitter that has led a bunch of people to start reading Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. I read it years ago, but plan on cracking it open again when I am finished with Turing’s vision. It got me wondering what other books about tech history people have enjoyed.
Some that I have enjoyed:
Levy’s Hackers - in particular the section about MIT and the beginnings there.
The Dream Machine - story about JCR Licklider, and the rise of modern computing.
Dealers of Lightning - story of the work done at Xerox PARC.
The Supermen - story of Seymour Cray’s work. I wish it would have gone into more detail, but still an interesting book.
Nice picks. I really enjoyed Three Degrees Above Zero, which is about the history and heyday of Bell Labs. Pairs nicely with Richard Hamming’s “You and Your Research” talk.
My favorite tech history about gaming is Kushner’s Masters of Doom about Carmack and Romero. Goes from childhood to the release of Q3/Daikatana.
I have a book called The Idea Factory, which is about Bell Labs, but I haven’t read it yet. Another I’m looking forward to reading is called A Mind at Play, which is about Claude Shannon and information theory. I’ll have to pick up Three Degrees Above Zero.
A Mind at Play looks great! I am going to read that. I haven’t read The Idea Factory yet either, but I intend to. I like reading books written decades apart about the same subject.
Andy Hertzfeld’s Revolution in the Valley - basically a collection of stories from the making of the mac.
Brian Bagnall’s books on Commodore and the Amiga. Fascinating and sad at the same time to read about some of the brilliant work done, and how it was screwed up.
I don’t know if this is what you are after but I read Accidental Empires by Robert X. Cringely many years ago and thought it was an excellent book on the beginnings of the computer companies.
It’s a blog not a book, but the Digital Antiquarian is fantastic. While it focuses on games there are also long and fascinating digressions on things like the development of operating systems, Jobs’s days at Apple, Xerox PARC, IBM’s attempts to break into the PC market, and even the parallel development of computers in the Soviet Union.
I have never read Cringley’s book, but he did a series of interviews of tech people about a decade ago that were pretty good. It looks like their home on the pbs site is gone, but searching Cringley and NerdTV brings them up in youtube.
I’ve stalled out on Stephenson pretty much since Cryptonomicon. I’ve read Seveneves, but every time I crack open the Baroque cycle I only get about a 3rd or half way into the 1st book before I get distracted by something else. One of these days I will make it through though. Sometimes I wonder if I have some degree of ADD as I tend to get distracted like that a lot.
The Baroque Cycle is my favorite, but the bleakness of Seveneves punched me harder in the gut. (Until the last part which was silly and I won’t spoil.)
I recommend Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators, which traces the development of computers forward from Ada Lovelace through the development of the transistor and Silicon Valley culture to the Internet and Apple and Google. It’s a fun read, and the parallels between innovators at different times are interesting.
