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by melvinroest 2253 days ago
Here's another entry that's a bit unorganized. It's also a bit more of a recent (and sometimes older) history related things that I learned about mostly through HN. Replies / additions to this are welcome.

__Lisp (programming language)__

The Structure and Implementation of Computer Programs (you need to use a search engine for this, there are many different versions of it).

Anything Paul Graham wrote about Lisp (e.g. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

__Hacking__

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

__Smalltalk (programming language)__

Alan Kay Smalltalk is not about objects, it's about messaging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852444

Smalltalk is awesome and one of the historical predecessors of Objective-C.

__Xerox Parc__

Unfortunately, I don't know of any seminal paper or media piece. I just know they were hugely influential. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

Alan Kay worked there.

2 comments

For Xerox, Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning is a good source.

(The opportunities that Xerox lost because of short-sightedness, political shenanigans and just plain incompetence will probably make you mad. It's a good cautionary tale).

This is a fascinating report from Alan Kay about the history of Smalltalk up until the Smalltalk-80 days:

http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/