We were burning
Are the Japanese faceless clones who march in lockstep to the drums beaten by big business and the bureaucrats of MITI, Japan's miracle-working ministry of international trade and industry? Can Japanese workers, and by extrapolation their entire society, be characterized by deference to authority, devotion to group solidarity, and management by consensus? In We Were Burning, investigative journalist Bob Johnstone demolishes this misleading stereotype by introducing us to a new and very different kind of Japanese worker - a dynamic, iconoclastic, risk-taking entrepreneur.
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What Hacker News says
- Steven Levy's Hackers of course, but also his Crypto which is in some ways even better.
Michael A. Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning about the heyday of computing research at Xerox PARC isn't universally praised (IIRC it's more or less Bob Metcalfe's version of the story) but it is very readable.
Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning, about the golden age of Japanese consumer electronics (wich also covers many events and actors in the US and UK).
David Kushner's Masters of Doom, about the heyday of Id Software.
The First Computers—History and Architectures is a more academic book, a selection of history papers, but it's still very readable. The Computer Pioneers: Pioneer Computers videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qundvme1Tik&list=PL14396C953... , presented by Gordon Moore himself, cover much of the same ground (it says little about the wartime Bletchley Park computers).
If I'm going to allow myself some videos then I should also mention Steve Blank "Secret History of Silicon Valley" talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo and David Alan Grier's "When Computers Were Human" talk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YwqltwvPnkw .
- Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning has a fascinating look at the development of the first blue laser diodes.
http://www.amazon.com/We-Were-Burning-Entrepreneurs-Electron...
- If you want a far more detailed discussion, especially one that goes into why it can't work, see Eamonn Fingleton's book Unsustainable (or the earlier version In Praise of Hard Industries, there is little difference between them).
And if you want a good story about specifically how innovation grows out of practice, see Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning about the Japanese development of the first blue-light laser diode.
- Eric Gilliam's "How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions?" https://www.freaktakes.com/p/how-did-places-like-bell-labs-k... came to a similar conclusion. (It did well here just a couple of months ago, too https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43295865 , so it is a little disappointing that the discussion seems to be starting from the beginning here again.) Another point which you've both made is that other big US firms had very important industrial research labs, too. (RCA Labs is one that seems to get little love these days, at least outside the pages of We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... Also, to be fair, "Areoform" did mention Xerox PARC once in TFA.) Indeed, overstating the uniqueness of Bell Labs helps to billow up the clouds of mystique, but it's probably harmful to a clear understanding of how it actually worked.
But the ultimate problem with TFA is that it seems to be written to portray venture capitalists(?), or at least this group of VCs who totally get it, as on the side of real innovation along with ... Bell Labs researchers(?) and Bell Labs executives(?) ... against the Permanent Managerial Class which has ruined everything. Such ideas have apparently been popular for a while, but I think we can agree that after the past year or two the joke isn't as funny as it used to be anymore.
- Pasting my comment on the article https://www.construction-physics.com/p/what-would-it-take-to... :
> RCA Laboratories/the Sarnoff Research Center is surely one of the most important of the American corporate labs with similarities to Bell Labs. (It features prominently in Bob Johnstone's We Were Burning https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/bob-johnstone/we-we... : it has a big role in the history of the Japanese semiconductor industry, in large part because of its roles in the development of the transistor and the LCD and its thirst for patent-licensing money.)
>> In Dealers of Lightning, Michael Hiltzik argues that by the 1990s PARC was no longer engaged in such unrestricted research decoupled from product development.
> According to Hiltzik and most other sources, the PARC Computer Science Lab's salad days were over as early as 1983, when Bob Taylor was forced to leave, while the work of the other PARC labs focussed on physics and materials science wasn't as notable in the period up to then.
Seriously: if this kind of thing interests you at all, go and read We Were Burning.
- Also covered in Chapter 3 of We Were Burning: Japanese Entrepreneurs And The Forging Of The Electronic Age by Bob Johnstone http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2135359.We_Were_Burning .
