Name: The History of the Future
ISBN: 9780062455963

The History of the Future

In The History of the Future, Harris once again deep-dives into a tech drama for the ages to expertly tell the larger-than-life true story of Oculus, the virtual reality company founded in 2012 that--less than two years later--would catch the attention of Mark Zuckerberg and wind up being bought by Facebook for over $2 billion dollars. This incredible underdog story begins with inventor Palmer Luckey, then just a nineteen-year-old dreamer, living alone in a camper trailer in Long Beach, California. At the time, virtual reality--long-hailed as the ultimate technology--was so costly and experimental that it was unattainable outside of a few research labs and military training facilities. But with the founding of Oculus, and the belief that his tantalizing vision of the future could one day be more than science fiction, Luckey put everything he had into creating a device that would allow gamers like him to step into virtual worlds and, in doing so, hopefully kickstart a VR revolution. With the help of an industry legend, a serial entrepreneur, and a slew of colorful characters--including those behind gaming sensations like Doom, Words with Friends, and Guitar Hero--Luckey's scrappy startup would finally deliver the dream of immersive and affordable virtual reality to consumers, leading geeks and gamers to be excited in a way that they hadn't been in years, and tech firms and investors scrambling to get in on the action before it was too late.

What Hacker News says

modzuNov 2022

if you find this interesting, you might be interested in the book it came from, "the history of the future" by blake harris

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AlchemistCampDec 2020

That was a fantastic read. It pretty much defined my standard for an engineering work ethic. There are other books he played a prominent role in that I enjoined.

Dungeons and Dreamers was a side by side story and contrast between Carmack and Id's path vs Richard Garriot and Origin Systems.

The History of the Future features a much older John Carmack at the top of the industry, joining Palmer Lucky and a team of young entrepreneurs to build Oculus and VR. The entrepreneurial and technical ride is at least as wild as the one in Masters of Doom.

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shafyyJul 2019

The History of the Future by Blake J. Harris. It's about the foundation and subsequent acquisition of Oculus by Facebook. He has done a lot of first-hand interviews with the involved parties.

It reads like a movie script, and it's full of drama (e.g Palmer Luckey and FB) and full of little gems and information. Even if you're not intersted in VR, it's a great read.

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theNJRMar 2019

I have conflicting thoughts about Oculus' domination. Last night was an interesting example, Facebook went down and took Oculus with it. But beyond that, if this is going to be the platform of the future, we're going to need more than one company behind it. History tells me that there is a better solution being built in a garage right now. If Lucky Palmer could do it in the 2010's, someone else can be doing it again now. I'd certainly vote for that company to be stand alone.

Have you read The History of the Future (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0062455966) yet?

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FamicomanDec 2018

Only 9 books this year, https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/40352124-mike?shelf=re...

Highlights are:

* Networks of New York by Ingrid Burrington - A fascinating look at the communications infrastructure in NYC, written as a field guide. Inspired me to make a website in the same style for Philadelphia.

* Kitten Clone: The History of the Future at Bell Labs by Douglas Coupland - This is my first non-fiction Coupland book and it was nice to see his punchy writing translate to the topic. The chapter where he goes to the old facility in New Jersey is fantastic. There is a shorter, edited version of this part online, https://www.wired.com/2014/09/coupland-bell-labs/

* The Philip K. Dick Reader - My second time reading any Dick, this collection is amazing, lengthy, and inexpensive to pick up. You'll be up all night reading this and surprised how sci-fi from the '50s is so relevant today.

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alien0006Dec 2025

Hey HN! We're Arnav and Jeremy and we're building Browser Buddy, a recommendation system you can chat with to find quality Internet writing based on your interests and aspirations.

As we've grown up, this writing was a source of inspiration that helped us discover ideas and opportunities we didn't even know we were looking for (ex. applying to YC because of PG's essays).

But despite so many new creators and websites coming online, the best of the open Internet remains hard-to-find, scattered across personal sites (https://www.paulgraham.com/, https://www.eugenewei.com/), niche publications (https://www.noemamag.com/, https://worksinprogress.co/), and various independent publishing platforms (https://bearblog.dev/, https://substack.com/, https://medium.com/). Outside of "social" media platforms, there's very high friction to get into a new subject or stumble upon credible people who write about your interests.

We feel there should be an easier (and mobile-friendly) way to find fantastic media and curate this intentional, interesting information diet for yourself.

Browser Buddy is an iOS app that curates this interesting, thought-provoking writing for you from across the Internet. It's particularly good to explore topics like programming, startups, math, philosophy, machine learning, and design.

Here's a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VmEeo4mjc7U

Here are some example recommendations:

"I'm trying to grow my early stage consumer internet company": https://cdixon.org/2015/01/31/come-for-the-tool-stay-for-the... https://www.lennysnewsletter.com/p/how-the-biggest-consumer-...

"I want to learn how to build beautiful web interfaces": https://frankchimero.com/blog/2015/the-webs-grain/ https://alistapart.com/article/responsive-web-design/

"Teach me the history of the Internet": https://www.mic.com/impact/how-geocities-webrings-made-the-9... https://computerhistory.org/blog/history-of-the-future-octob...

"I'm trying to read more about games and game theory": https://franklantz.substack.com/p/playing-balatro https://joecarlsmith.com/2022/03/16/on-expected-utility-part...

"I've been getting into network science and network theory": https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/10/27/warrens-plazas-and-the... https://www.strangeloopcanon.com/p/seeing-like-a-network

We trained a language model to recommend webpages how people do through hyperlinks. Hyperlinks can be an expressive way to describe a webpage (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/07/01/the-rhetoric-of-the-hy...), but there's a lot of spam and low-quality linking online that would serve as bad training examples. We found the structure of the link graph to still be a fantastic way to understand what content is salient, and used it heavily to filter and build our dataset. The resulting model is best for expressive, exploratory queries where you describe what you are looking for (like a prompt to an LLM) rather than entering in keywords (like a search on Google). This model is the main "curation" step in our system that picks from our index of ~150 million (and growing) webpages.

We built Browser Buddy to try and recreate the feeling of getting a thoughtful recommendation from a smart friend. Our early users have described it as a "refreshing stream of timely and timeless writing", "serendipitous discovery", "rabbit holes that feel joyfully unfunneled". We are iterating on the concept and how it's presented, but we really value the HN community and would love to hear what you all think:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/browser-buddy/id6752281959

Thank you for your time and being a part of the Internet we love!

Jeremy (jeremy@browserbuddy.com) and Arnav (arnav@browserbuddy.com)

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