Stats for nerds
2recommend
3mentions
3people
2020–2026years
67% recommend33% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- You might be interested in the book "when computers were human".
"Computer" in 1940 meant a woman who does computations
- 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 .
- More on the topic:
Review of 2005 book "When Computers Were Human" 424pp. ISBN: 0-691-09157-9
https://web.archive.org/web/20060821120909/http://www.pupres...
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A New History of Modern Computing
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