Ask HN: Greatest books about the history of computing | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Greatest books about the history of computing

15 pointskaycebasques18 comments

The Dream Machine is giving me a great appreciation of the time-sharing revolution and ARPANET. What else should I read? Any timeframe or topic is OK, so long as it's strongly related to the history of computing.

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The standard textbooks by historians are:

A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi

There is a completely rewritten version of this with an additional author:

A New History of Modern Computing by Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi

Also:

Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray

There are good books by journalists and popular writers. Favorites on HN are:

The Dream Machine -- you are already reading this. Also:

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthey Lyon

These and many many other books are recomended and described in this HN thread from a few years ago:

Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281

Are there any books about the semiconductor industry?

Quick plug for my HN book club on that book! We just finished Ch 1 of The Dream Machine, if you’re interested in joining.

https://discord.gg/9tgxgg3J

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood by James Gleick

It's a little zoomed out and more focused on information theory than computers, specifically, but the overlap is significant.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Information:_A_History,_a_...

The Art of Computer Programming contains a lot of computing history.

Also it is a lot of computing history.

Turing’s Cathedral

The Universal Computer

Computer Connections: https://computerhistory.org/blog/computer-history-museum-lic...

Tracy Kidder.The Soul of a New Machine.

About the development of the Data General new minicomputer. Published 1982.

Singh Simon - Code book is an excellent and fantastic read about the history of cryptography and provide insights of what really drove technical improvements in ww1 and 2.

The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder

Good book. Can be a bit dry here and there, but fascinating

A Quarter Century of UNIX

Underground: Tales of Hacking, Madness and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier

Brian Kernighan's newly released "UNIX: A History and a Memoir"

I second this. It's a wonderful read. I particularly enjoyed learning the history of various unix commands, for example, I was unfamiliar with the grep family of commands until the book explained it clearly. It also gives in more detail the tale of Ken Thompsan reverse engineering a printer firmware, CPU, and assembly language, and rewriting the entire firmware to be 1000x better, in about an hour.

Fire in the Valley - The making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine, published by McGraw Hill, 2000 463 pages. Excellent reference telling many of the P.C stories.

Dealers of lightning about Xerox parc is quite impressive

Two good ones: 1) Where Wizards Stay Up Late and 2) How the Internet Happened: From Netscape to the iPhone

The Computer from Pascal to Von Neumann by Herman Goldstine.

Chip War - Chris Miller

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