Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

Read papers by the people who actually invented things. I've been doing this a little recently, it's very eye opening.

Feynman’s Lectures on Computation: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07FJ6RRK7/ref=as_li_tl?ie...

You might be familiar with Feynman's Lectures on Physics, but his lectures on Computation (based on a class he taught and his work in 'Connection Machine') aren't any less amazing. Through this short book, Feynman guides us through the concept of computation and the van Neumann architecture in his unique style, from logic functions, to Turing machines, coding and even quantum computers. It will give you a unique appreciation of the finer points in which computers are "Dumb as hell but go like mad" so that you can better squeeze every bit of performance out of your code.

Try this book:

"Understanding Digital Computers : A Self-learning Programmed Text That Will Teach You the Basics for the Microcomputer Revolution" by Forrest M. Mims III.

It's dated, but the core material is still relevant. Even the dated sections might suit you if you're interested in the history.

In a similar same vein, a few years ago I wrote a course which starts with the idea of a bit and ends with the student programming a computer that they built themselves in a logic simulator.

https://john.daltons.info/teaching/engineering/

The first few lessons meander, as I was still figuring out a direction, so the meat starts at lesson 3. The last lessons are missing (roundtoit), but if there is interest I can put them on-line. From memory all the examples are on-line. Here is the final computer:

https://john.daltons.info/teaching/engineering/simcirjs/comp...

In this example a program is already in memory, so just push "run/stop" to make it run. The instruction set isn't on-line, as it's in the later lessons, which I haven't gotten around to uploading.

The MIT Press has published a fairly large set of books, mostly about IBM, that I found very useful for understanding the 1950s (and for IBM the early-mid 1960s as in the System/360). I would start with Project Whirlwind: The history of a pioneer computer by Kent C Redmond, that's a Digital Press as in DEC book, that computer by and large defined a great many standards in the way we build computers to this day, and that project also developed the first sane type of RAM, core memory.

The MIT Press books describe IBM starting in the punched card data processing era, how the above intersected with IBM in the SAGE project, and much more. IBM defined a great deal of what was used for a long time by many companies due to a previous punched card anti-trust settlement which required them to FRAND license their patents. So their electromechanical wizzardry turned to computer systems like the half-inch reel to reel tape became ubiquitous, was still the thing in the first part of my computing career.

DEC also published some good books about its history, I can look those up if you want.

These are some of the topics I've found to be very interesting, there's of course lots more published by them and others. But I like to focus on what became wildly successful, or what caused a company like IBM to falter very badly like when it become dogmatic in the System/360 days that virtual memory was a bad thing and would not be supported, in one stroke costing them the high end academic market and eventually resulting in their becoming a niche player.

For DEC, a study of the PDP-6/10 and PDP-11 is a necessity if you want follow my interests, the former became a dominant replacement for IBM computers, the latter was the system UNIX first became big on.

A few recommendations from an avid armchair computer historian:

- Dealers of Lightning is a wonderful book covering Xerox PARC's history and contributions. If you don't know what Xerox PARC is, then you should definitely read it.

- Where Wizards Stay Up Late is a highly-readable, engaging book covering the history of the Internet's early development.

- Soul of a New Machine gives a compelling glimpse into the era when physical machines and unique architectures were more dominant than software in shaping the market.

- The Jargon File as maintained by Eric Raymond is not without controversy, but I think it's still fair to say a lot of computing folklore and cultural history is preserved there. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html

- Folklore.org is a wonderful, wistful collection of stories from the early days of Apple Computer, as told by some of the engineers and programmers who made it what it was in the 80s and early 90s.

- The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace And Babbage is a wonderful graphic novel that's full of utterly ridiculous fiction that's only loosely inspired by the title characters. However, it is jam-packed with footnotes about the actual history from top to bottom, and in my opinion, there probably isn't a better or more fascinating glimpse of the proto-history of the computer anywhere.

- Douglas Engelbart's Mother Of All Demos is well worth watching (can be found on YouTube), and maybe reading some commentary on. Mind-blowing what his team put together that we still haven't really matched in some ways.

- Vannevar Bush's piece "As We May Think" isn't really about computers, but it's hard not to connect it to them when you read it. And then maybe to sigh and wonder how someone who didn't have any machine like what he describes can have a vision more compelling than what we've actually managed to build, so many decades before it happened.

- If you're interested in hypertext, look into Ted Nelson. None of his work ever really took off, and Project Xanadu was a legendary mishandled undertaking, but his vision for what might have been is fascinating, and influenced many of the software pioneers, as I understand it.

- This glorious video of using a 1930s teletype as a command-line Linux terminal taught me a surprising amount about why the classic Unix tools work as they do. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2XLZ4Z8LpEE

Enjoy!