A few good men from Univac

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1. kQq9oHeAz6wLLSDec 2021
   If you're into mainframe systems, A Few Good Men From UNIVAC is pretty interesting.

   Also recommend The Friendly Orange Glow, which is about PLATO

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2. kabdibMar 2021
   I read Soul of a New Machine in college, and then wound up working for a company that actually used the machine that the book was about (the Eclipse MV/8000) for cross-development of video games. This was 1982.

   I was used to a Unix-and-Emacs-on-a-VT100 environment, and while the MV/8000 didn't run Unix or have a port of Emacs, its OS and DG's standard screen editor were surprisingly pleasant to use, and the shell was pretty nice. It even had a C compiler (a big deal for the time). My only issue was that the department I was in used the machine for regular office work as well as engineering, and it was heavily loaded during the day with a bunch of terrible "office" software. My assembles took 45 minutes turnaround during the day, but only 5 minutes at night, and guess who didn't see the sun for their first six months at Atari?

   If you liked this book, I also recommend:

   Lundstrom's A Few Good Men from Univac (essentially a biography of Seymour Cray)

   Murray's The Supermen (well . . . ditto :-) )

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3. kabdibApr 2020
   Some of my favorites, that haven't been mentioned yet -

   The Supermen (Charles Murray), essentially a biography of Seymour Cray.

   A Few Good Men from Univac (Lundstrom and Aspray), similar thoughts about the same era of computing.

   Showstopper (Pascal Zachary), essentially a biography of David Cutler, plus a bunch of the development of Windows NT.

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4. cannedprimatesMay 2011
   A Few Good Men from UNIVAC
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5. kabdibNov 2010
   At first I didn't think I had any, so I did a quick scan of my bookshelves:

   _Anatomy of LISP_.

   I also did SiCP cover to cover in a few months when it first came out.

   _SmallTalk 80: Bits of History, Words of Advice_. Fantastic stuff; reading about making those early 80s processors run ST efficiently is like watching early rocketry.

   _The Unix Programming Environment_. This should date me.

   _Threaded Interpretive Languages_ (during the FORTH craze of the early 80s). Cured me of FORTH.

   Tannenbaum's book on MINIX (bought it the day it came out, had it signed by Tannenbaum at Computer Literacy in San Jose. What a crowd. I miss that store).

   That's about it. Of course there are many other computer-related books that I couldn't put down, such as _A Few Good Men from Univac_ and _The Soul of a New Machine_. But these are not about programming.

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6. KerrAvonApr 2023
   “Becoming Steve Jobs” is a much better book than Isaacson’s lazy effort.

   I wish someone would write more about Univacy, CDC, and Cray big iron. “A Few Good Men From Univac” and “Supermen” are fine books, but not exactly comprehensive the way the IBM 360/370 books are.

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