| A few recommendations from an avid armchair computer historian: - Dealers of Lightning is a wonderful book covering Xerox PARC's history and contributions. If you don't know what Xerox PARC is, then you should definitely read it. - Where Wizards Stay Up Late is a highly-readable, engaging book covering the history of the Internet's early development. - Soul of a New Machine gives a compelling glimpse into the era when physical machines and unique architectures were more dominant than software in shaping the market. - The Jargon File as maintained by Eric Raymond is not without controversy, but I think it's still fair to say a lot of computing folklore and cultural history is preserved there. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html - Folklore.org is a wonderful, wistful collection of stories from the early days of Apple Computer, as told by some of the engineers and programmers who made it what it was in the 80s and early 90s. - The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace And Babbage is a wonderful graphic novel that's full of utterly ridiculous fiction that's only loosely inspired by the title characters. However, it is jam-packed with footnotes about the actual history from top to bottom, and in my opinion, there probably isn't a better or more fascinating glimpse of the proto-history of the computer anywhere. - Douglas Engelbart's Mother Of All Demos is well worth watching (can be found on YouTube), and maybe reading some commentary on. Mind-blowing what his team put together that we still haven't really matched in some ways. - Vannevar Bush's piece "As We May Think" isn't really about computers, but it's hard not to connect it to them when you read it. And then maybe to sigh and wonder how someone who didn't have any machine like what he describes can have a vision more compelling than what we've actually managed to build, so many decades before it happened. - If you're interested in hypertext, look into Ted Nelson. None of his work ever really took off, and Project Xanadu was a legendary mishandled undertaking, but his vision for what might have been is fascinating, and influenced many of the software pioneers, as I understand it. - This glorious video of using a 1930s teletype as a command-line Linux terminal taught me a surprising amount about why the classic Unix tools work as they do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE Enjoy! |