Name: From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog
ISBN: 9780262532624

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog

From its first glimmerings in the 1950s, the software industry has evolved to become the fourth largest industrial sector of the US economy. Starting with a handful of software contractors who produced specialized programs for the few existing machines, the industry grew to include producers of corporate software packages and then makers of mass-market products and recreational software. This book tells the story of each of these types of firm, focusing on the products they developed, the business models they followed, and the markets they served. By describing the breadth of this industry, Martin Campbell-Kelly corrects the popular misconception that one firm is at the center of the software universe. He also tells the story of lucrative software products such as IBM's CICS and SAP's R/3, which, though little known to the general public, lie at the heart of today's information infrastructure. With its wealth of industry data and its thoughtful judgments, this book will become a starting point for all future investigations of this fundamental component of computer history.

What Hacker News says

RochusJan 2024

The computer boys take over - computers, programmers, and the politics of technical expertise (2012): https://www.amazon.com/Computer-Boys-Take-Over-Programmers/d...

Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (2009): https://www.amazon.com/Invention-Information-Lemelson-Studie...

From airline reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog - a history of the software industry (2003): https://www.amazon.com/Airline-Reservations-Sonic-Hedgehog-C...

thread

RochusMar 2020

- ENIAC - The triumphs and tragedies of the world's first computer

- Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age

- From airline reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog - a history of the software industry

- History of programming languages Volumes 1 to 3

thread

RNeffSep 2012

Computing: A Concise History by Paul E. Ceruzzi

From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly/

The Computer History Museum is in Mountain View, CA, part of Silicon Valley, close to the Googleplex and Microsoft SV. It has the second, working Babbage Difference Engine. Also a youtube channel of lectures.

thread

kralljaApr 2022

The textbooks I used in university were "From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry" (Campbell-Kelly) and "A History of Modern Computing (second edition)" (Ceruzzi). There is a brand-new update to the second one, "A New History of Modern Computing" (Haigh/Ceruzzi) that I'm looking forward to reading this summer.

thread

ganeumannJul 2015

The most authoritative work is Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing (http://amzn.to/1TiHgqd). Because it's written by an academic, not a journalist, it also has a great bibliography and footnotes. Some of the works it cites that are very valuable in themselves, depending on your area of interest, are:

- R. Hodeson, Crystal Fire (on the invention of the transistor), http://amzn.to/1RictfF

- T.R. Reid, The Chip (on the IC), http://amzn.to/1Hdbu8w

- E.W. Pugh, IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems, (on the evolution of computer architecture), http://amzn.to/1NKZcWQ

Also, as others have mentioned, Soul of a New Machine is awesome.

I feel like you may be asking about computer science, though, not computer hardware. If so, pickings are slim. Two that stand out are:

- S. Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code, http://amzn.to/1HdbJk1 (Not really a history of code, just the history of a single project)

- M. Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog, http://amzn.to/1RicYpS (which, while not quite as amazing as the others, is the only history of the software industry as a whole I know of.)

thread

kralljaJul 2015

The "History of Computing" class I took in college used Ceruzzi's "A History of Modern Computing" and "From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog" as our textbooks.

thread