[TheOtherHobbes]

Lookup tables are a good way to do fast arithmetic. Some IEEE 754 implementations still use them - usually with interpolation - for certain functions.

That aside - hardware technologies, storage systems, ISAs, engineering enhancements (like paging, caches, microcode, and others), operating systems, market segmentation (micro, mini, super, etc), languages, and compiler theory all have their own separate histories.

You don't need to know the histories to write good code, but they're all interesting in their own right.

All the book suggestions here are good, but I'd also recommend a rummage through the huge bitsavers computing archive (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/) for first hand notes, memos, and documents from a huge selection of manufacturers and facilities.

It's a bit of a disorganised grab bag with a fair amount of noise, but the IBM, DEC, Burroughs, CDC and various university archives have some fascinating material.

[vincent-manis]

One thing I learned from 30 years doing university-level teaching is that if you throw a grab bag at people, most of them won't learn much of anything. That's why university courses (and good textbooks) tend to impose a bit of structure on what's to be learned. My advice: pick one or two books from the plethora mentioned in this thread, and work your way through them. Once you have built a mental model of the particular topic areas you want to understand, then you can start widening your search.

As for lookup tables, I won't say anything bad about them in general. That said, if you pressed the Memory Clear button on a 1620 console, it would wipe the addition and multiplication tables, meaning you couldn't even load a program until you had manually entered replacement values. This was a Dumb Idea :).