| For "how things work", I recommend the book Code by Charles Petzold. After that, Jon Stokes's Inside the Machine will give a lot of details on CPU architectures up to Intel's Core 2 Duo. You can also try following along a computer engineering book if you want to go that low in detail with exercises,
Digital Fundamentals by Floyd is a common textbook (I have an old 8th edition). History-wise, enjoy learning slowly because there's so much that even if you dedicated yourself to it you wouldn't be "done" any time soon! Some suggestions in order though: Watching The Mother of All Demos: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY A short clip of Sketchpad presented by Alan Kay: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI An article from the 40s that also inspired Engelbart: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m... The Information by James Gleick What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg Lastly, to mix up in whatever order you please, some paper collections: Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective edited by Andreas Paepcke History of Programming Languages papers for various langs you're interested in, here's the set from the second conference in 1993 https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766 but there have been further conferences to check out too if it's interesting Also all of the Turing Award winners' lectures I've read have been good https://amturing.acm.org/lectures.cfm All that and some good recommendations others have given should keep you busy for a while! |