Check this thread[1] from a few weeks ago. The Dream Machine is a great book that goes into great detail from the very beginning, and how we got here.
Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
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Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
#12History of Programming Languages conferences — HOPL II and HOPL III proceedings are temporarily free online. https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766 https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/1238844
And of course many ‘primary source’ classic papers published by ACM are temporarily free.
Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
#13What I'm about to link considers the multimedia aspect of computing and a bit the history of the world wide web.
__Vannevar Bush__
Vannevar Bush is the person who came up with the idea that one could link information as opposed to methods that physical libraries use (catalogs, indexing, etc.). His implementation details are funny to read in hindsight. His conceptual ideas are nothing but amazing and a reality at the moment. It also highlights why we should separate conceptual ideas from implementation. The biggest reason is: despite the fact that you can't implement a certain system yet, having the conceptual ideas ready means that other people can be inspired by it when the technological requirements catch up.
Read his seminal essay "As We May Think" here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
__Douglas Engelbart__
If Vannevar Bush is considered the grandfather, then Douglas Engelbart is considered to be the father of multimedia.
Read Douglas Engelbart his seminal paper from 1962 on how multimedia would help humans process information faster. It's called:
Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework
https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138
Check out the mother of all demo's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
and here: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/448/
Engelbart just blew my mind. He basically prototyped a simple version of TeamViewer + Skype in 1968! And even still, it has features in there that I still haven't seen (dual mouse control when using TeamViewer).
I wonder if Bill Gates read about him because if he did, then it was either too hard to implement some of Engelbart's his ideas in Windows 95, or he simply didn't read about it and now we're lagging 10 to 20 years behind on certain aspects of our multimedia experience.
__Ted Nelson__
The "younger brother" (= same time, related but not the same ideas) of Douglas. Ted Nelson is a bit of a controversial figure. Nevertheless, I do think he deserves a spot on this list. I'll leave it at that.
__I wrote a bit more about this stuff__
If you like this stuff, I invite you to read some of the introductory stuff of my thesis [1].
[1]
First 3 paragraphs of: https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/
and
1.3.1 "In the beginning" of https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/documentation/theses/ma...
The thesis itself zooms in on an old concept called hypermedia (not hypermedia APIs, that came way later), which is a bit of an alternate reality of HTML5. While that's not really important to know about, it shares the same history up until the early 90's.
Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
#14> I think knowing the history of how we got to where we are helps to understand ot more.
This is a great attitude, especially in our largely ahistoric industry. I wish I thought this way when I started programming.
The book "The Dream Machine" [0] does a fantastic job going into the ideas driving the pioneers. It especially focuses on ARPA and PARC, so you'll get a nice overview of the ideas explored there. And it is a fun read too.
It was out of print for quite some time, until Stripe Press bought the rights and brought it back to print [1]. They also give it away at conferences, as they want more people to be exposed to the ideas of the book.
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1...
Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
#15The innovators by Walter Isaacson is also good.
Start from the first attempt to automate calculation in a human history.
Move to transistors, PC, Apple, windows, linux, google, and so on.
Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
#16Wow, can't believe nobody has mentioned the classic, _Hackers_, by Steven Levy.
Another book I found interesting, but is focused more on the early history of Silicon Valley as a whole, not just computing, is _Valley of Genius_, by Adam Fisher.
Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
#17Don Eyles' writing about programming the lunar module (which was something he did!) is fantastic [1]. There's also a gallery of photos on that site and he has a whole book!
And, click around on Bret Victor's references page[2] -- it's a real treasure. Despite my constant fear that mentioning it will make it go away, it needs to be shared to be useful. It's a big collection of classic papers and interviews. Someone mentioned "As You May Think", which is on there, as is Bush's follow-up from ~20 years later, and Douglas Engelbart's own partly annotated version of the original!
Also check out folklore[3], which is a great bunch of stories about working at Apple in its early days, by people who worked there (mostly Andy Hertzfeld, I'm pretty sure).
Lastly, look up "Ignition!" by John Drury Clark[4], which is a tangent, but is amazing -- it's about the history of the design of rocket engines, largely about the wild experiments and chemical science involved, and is very well written. I didn't feel right finding a pdf to link straight to, but they aren't that hard to find.
As a bonus, this isn't so much historical, but it's a great inspirational essay, Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research"(transcript[5], a video version[6]). Talks about working at Bell Labs and the different cultural elements there across people as part of analysing what makes certain people truly great.
1 - https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html
2 - http://worrydream.com/refs/
4 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drury_Clark
5 - https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.htm
Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
#18Not an article, but Kirk McKusick (a very longtime developer of BSD) gave a few talks on BSD and UNIX history (and the beginnings of TCP/IP), which are on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSXXeiFLgk
If you prefer text, you can find it in Chapter 1 of his book "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System": https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operati... (the chapter seems to be available in the book preview)
Eric S. Raymond also wrote a nice chapter on UNIX history in "The Art of Unix Programming": http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/historychapter.h...
Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
#19Folklore [1] has many stories and first hand accounts, especially Apple and Mac related.
Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?
#20A couple years ago I attend this talk by Paul Wesling at Stanford. It's the most interesting, exhaustive account I have heard. It goes all the way back to the early days of Ham Radio enthusiasm in the Bay Area around the early 1910s, following the stories of three pioneers: Jack McCullough, William Eitel, and Charles Litton to modern days.
It was a special day that day... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRDB_W6POys you can see me sitting on the floor at 1:40 :^)