Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

Comment by yeukhon | Hacker News Reader

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I am just going to drop a few quick comments. It's 6:39AM in NY, and I just woke up. Maybe not relevant at all, but...

I love reading about biography like these. I own a couple books, for example, "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet" did keep me awake for a few days on an early train. This one, absolutely easy to digest, thank you for sharing.

1. So do the four code bases share code they reuse (think of a common repository they depend on)?

2. Are the query planners all different because they needed to be platform specific?

3. Is DB2 still on four code bases?

Would be awesome if we have one central catalog of stories like this one.

BTW, I didn't know much about the author, so I did some quick googling: http://mvdirona.com/jrh/work/

(I hope HN won't flood it to 404! Mr. James, is this on AWS!? It looks like it might be.)

Totally off topic but I just grabbed that book of my shelf to reread over the holidays while traveling

Commentary: totally too many names to keep track of so to future readers, my adivce is avoid a long gap between each reading. But it is fun to learn all the names and what was going on at that time.

If you have time to list the other books that you own like this and "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet", I'd definitely appreciate it. I love reading these types of stories too!

"Showstopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsof" by G. Pascal Zachary is great, about an interesting period of Microsoft's life.

Not sure if it fits your bill, but I found "I Sing The Body Electronic" by Fred Moody a very interesting read.

Moody was able to get some pretty intimate insights into the development of a software product at Microsoft at the beginning of the 1990s (1992-1993, I think).

I was surprised to learn afterwards that Moody had (has?) a reputation for being very pro-Microsoft; this book does not embellish the problems the people on the project team face, nor their conflicts.

I liked "The Friendly Orange Glow: The Untold Story of the PLATO System and the Dawn of Cyberculture" which sounds related... I hadn't heard about PLATO before, and the book was strongly redolent of "online culture".

I will add as well:

"The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution"

"We were burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs And The Forging Of The Electronic Age"

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