Ask HN: Favorite true story tech book? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Favorite true story tech book?

31 pointsamilr55 comments

My personal favorite is "The Soul of a New Machine".

Founders at Work. Lots of good true stories. Encourages me to work on my own true story.

If the author ever writes a vol. 2, and if karma correlates with startup success, then it looks like you have a good chance to be featured in it:)

Here's hoping, but I kind of doubt it. Correlation not causation, etc.

Accidental Empires: How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date

Bob Cringely

(This book gets mentioned in Founders At Work... I think one of the Lycos guys had read it?)

You're thinking of Joe Kraus, who says him reading Accidental Empires lead to Excite succeeding.

Book -> Cringely -> Digitizing job -> VC -> VC -> funding or something like that.

Seconded. Cringely is the only one who doesn't make everything seem ooh-ahh-magical-brains! predetermined.

Altho that tell-all on the Segway (Code Name Ginger) was pretty cool for all the flaws it pointed out.

Where the Wizards Stay Up Late was a book I did an interactive presentation on in 7th grade, so it always has a special place in my heart. In retrospect, it's not fun to read, but at the time, I devoured it. It's boring and nothing really happens, which really is a good metaphor for the most exciting technical change.

Ooh, and "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal." Especially if you're into UI and unsung heroes.

Not a novel, or a single book, but I love Richard Feynman's descriptions of Los Alamos. I can read his accounts of mental arithmetic battles with Bohr, safecracking, the programming of dozens of old-school human computers, all day long.

Los Alamos is still an amazing place. I highly recommend visiting if you ever get the chance.

The Cuckoo's Egg: a true crime hacker espionage thriller.

LOVED this book! I wouldn't consider myself a reader, but I literally could not put it down once I started.

I vote up this book - especially for sysadmins.

"Underground" by Susan Dreyfus

It is about the phreaking/BBS era, specifically the Australian scene.

The deadtree version is impossible to find, but the author has released it as an ebook.

Download here: http://www.underground-book.net/download.php3

Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan. Recounts the true story of GO Corporation and the folks involved including John Doer and Bill Campbell. Been awhile since I picked this up but I remember it was a fun read.

"A Computer Called LEO" - story of the first commercial computer, used to run Lyons teashops. Fascinating both in terms of computer history, and history in general, especially Lyons' attitude to perfectionism, to the extent of doing many things themselves, that these days would never survive an outsourcing purge.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Computer-Called-LEO-Worlds-Office/dp...

"The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder

Drags a bit in places, but is still interesting in a history type way. It's the story of Data General building a 32-bit minicomputer in a year in the 1970s.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Soul-New-Machine-Tracy-Kidder/dp/031...

The various accounts weaved into The Jargon File. Gave me, early on in my programming life, a pretty good flavor of what being a hacker was really like.

Which reminds me. The Jargon File could really use an update. Any takers?

How the Web Was Won: How Bill Gates and His Internet Idealists Transformed the Microsoft Empire

It portrays what I'd call "an idealized" version of events in that it's a fairly positive account of Microsoft's battle to beat Netscape. But it's a great story. What most people don't realize is there's a whole group of Softies inside Microsoft who were and still are fighting for the ideals that the Internet represents. The early days of IE and IIS represents a time when that group was allowed to shine and they produced great things.

It's actually very inspiring especially if you're a person whose found himself arguing for those same values in whatever company you work for.

Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age

In general, "Revolution in the Valley" about the making of the Macintosh. You cen feel the excitement of the team, and it goes into some fun technical details on how they created a GUI while everyone else outside research labs was still text-based.

For game programmers, "Masters of Doom" and "Dungeons and Dreamers". Both have a real human perspective on the people and companies they cover; they made me feel like regular humans, not gods, made games.

Showstopper. This influenced me to join Microsoft and work on the same team as Dave Cutler

Masters of Deception: The Gang That Ruled Cyberspace by Michele Slatalla

Story is circa 1990.

If you liked this, you should check out Underground by Suelette Dreyfus. It's by far the best book about hackers ever written.

Edit: Oops, already mentioned in this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=621273

"One Jump Ahead: Computer Perfection at Checkers" - How Dr. Schaeffer's team came up with Chinook, the program that became world champion at checkers. Later the team went on to solve checkers (like tic tac toe is a "solved" game).

Some of the book is about researching new algorithms etc, but a large chunk is about programming, debugging etc. Very enjoyable read.

Skunkworks

Excellent book. I've long since lost my copy, but I think I'll try to procure another today.

I've got a copy I can lend you. Somehow I didn't know you were a fan.

<em>Dreaming in Code</em>

Chandler Project.

The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle by Michael Shnayerson.

If that gives you a taste for how crazy General Motors is, follow up with On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors by John Z. Delorian. Less about tech, more about management anti patterns!

Artificial Life, by Steven Levy - I've lost count of how many times I've read it.

A great book for inquisitive minds. I first read it when I was nine, and it got me started programming.

Hackers, by Steven Levy is a great book too.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers_Heroes_of_the_Computer_...

I'm still reading "What the Dormouse Said: How 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer", but I'm finding it quite good. Though I guess it's more about tech (counter)culture than tech itself.

Try finding a copy of Computer Lib/Dream Machines by Ted Nelson (1974), it's pretty awesome.

http://www.amazon.com/dp/0914845497/

To establish his credibility he lists both his "technology credentials" and his "counter culture credentials". If I had a time machine it would be nice to send him a copy of "Worse is Better". If he had read it maybe he wouldn't have failed at inventing the web.

"The New New Thing" by Michael Lewis is great: entertainingly written, and actually quite instructive about SV culture. "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" by Jerry Kaplan was also very good.

Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World, Jill Jonnes

An extremely detailed and engaging book on how electricity was brought to the United States.

Tesla: Man Out of Time touches a bit on the race between Edison and Tesla. A very good book as well.

Does this book cover the business relationship that Tesla had with Westinghouse?

The impression that I got from Empires of Light is that Tesla's "research" needed a lot of "design" by Westinghouse's engineers before they could be turned into practical, working designs.

That makes sense at some level, but I'd love to read other perspectives.

The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop. It's a very fun, easy, and interesting read of the origins of modern computing, the people who worked day and night to make their vision a reality, and the passion that carried their dreams to reality (the book, besides mentioning Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, also names people from Grace Hopper to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates).

The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. It's not actually a "tech book" but it is a true story about the highly technical science of how a deadly virus spread.

Free as in Freedom, a story about Stallman. I liked the unusual story of rms driving a car and freaking out as he had to follow someone taking the "scenic route".

My least favorite was The Google Story - I couldn't stomach more than a chapter or two of it. It read like the sort of ass-kissing "He's a hero" crap that I encounter from living in an oil dictatorship.

Not quite a book, but I recently read and enjoyed the first essay from Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up - the essay is called "Two Young Men Who Went West" and is about Robert Noyce and William Shockley and the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor.

Tossing it out there because most people wouldn't buy that book looking for a true story tech book, but a little of it is.

Masters of Doom

If you liked MoD, then you'll probably enjoy "Dungeons and Dreamers" too; and the "Postmortems" book from Game Developer.

Soul of a New Machine.

Made me want to go to school for real, and study EE.

I ended up switching to CS (software == opinionated reality; way more fun!) but that book really inspired me.

Especially the ad for Data General employees, described early in the book: "Have fun and make money."

Seems like the correct priority there.

Can't pick just one, but I enjoyed: Tuxedo Park, Soul Of a New Machine, and The Deadly Fuze.

The Official Book of Ultima. About how Richard Garriot started the Ultima series of computer role-playing games, and founded Origin Systems. Alas, it's sad when you consider the fate which befell both the game series and the company.

http://www.amazon.com/Behind-Deep-Blue-Building-Computer/dp/...

The story behind the building of the Deep Blue chess playing computer.

Great read. Inspirational.

Victorian Internet, Tom Standage

http://www.amazon.com/Victorian-Internet-Remarkable-Nineteen...

Fortune's Formula by William Poundstone. The story behind Claude Shannon and Ed Thorpe gambling (and then using those techniques on Wall Street).

Steve Squyres' Roving Mars (the book, not the movie)

Art of intrusion - Kevin Mitnick

Fire in the Valley, hands-down.

Snowball: The Business of Life

I can't recommend "High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars" by Charles Ferguson highly enough. He basically had the idea for the internet then, after Netscape launched just as he was creating a startup, morphed into making the first set of dev tools for the web -- Frontpage. Microsoft ended up buying them. He writes an utterly fascinating look at Microsoft, Gates, Netscape, Clarksdale, and the people who built the internet. He illustrates the strategies you use to build a platform and begs Netscape to follow them in the face of Microsoft "getting" the internet. In any case, it's well worth your time if you like startups; he also writes at length about the problems with non technical CEOs, etc.

http://www.amazon.com/High-Stakes-No-Prisoners-Internet/dp/1...

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