1–10 of 13 posts
- The Information - What does technology want - Robot Mere machine to transcend mind - Zero
and a bunch of other books in the realm, most of them are to some extent philosophical which I really enjoy.
But I am looking for a book that takes a more hardcore historical approach and kind of takes us trough
In my "History of Technology" course in college we read, "The Soul of a New Machine" by Tracy Kidder. More of a journalist's history of how a team built a new computer.
Code by Charles Petzold is an in depth history of programming. Very good book.
Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner (specifically the internet)
https://commons.lbl.gov/display/itdivision/Berkeley+Lab+Publ...
https://archive.org/details/bstj-archives
This report from BBN is a pretty great example of the level of detail and insider history that can be discovered. I really wish there was more stuff like this extant.
http://walden-family.com/bbn/bbn-print2.pdf
Youtube is of course an endless treasure trove as well. From The MIT Vault is a bit of a time machine unto itself. And you can always find the random Netscape Communicator conference keynote from 1997 with a young Marc Andreessen. As well as oral histories and product demos like "RAND Corp presents the Graphics Rocket!" on the Computer History Museum channel ;)
https://www.youtube.com/user/FromTheVaultofMIT
https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory/videos
On the softcore front. I am thinking of revisiting Daniel Boorstin's "Knowledge Trilogy". Completely out of vogue in our age of Taleb, Hariri and Gladwell. Probably chock full of cringe inducing corniness. But I remember loving the vivid writing style as a kid.
It's a history of electronic invention over the past 150 years. Not the best from a historiographical point of view, but very insightful for getting inside of the minds of those who developed the technology, and getting a sense of the tech itself, the mental steps required to invent it, and the personalities of those involved.