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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?

#31

Post by linguae »

melvinroest wrote: post #21

Here's another entry that's a bit unorganized. It's also a bit more of a recent (and sometimes older) history related things that I learned about mostly through HN. Replies / additions to this are welcome. __Lisp (programming language)__ The Structure and Implementation of Computer Programs (you need to use a search engine for this, there are many different versions of it). Anything Paul Graham wrote about Lisp (e.g.…

This is a fascinating report from Alan Kay about the history of Smalltalk up until the Smalltalk-80 days:

http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#32

Post by resheku »

not a read but a youtube channel

Computerphile https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9-y-6csu5WGm29I7JiwpnA

especially all the videos with professor Brailsford are great with many references to history of computing and there are some with Brian Kernighan too

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#33

Post by petercooper »

Not exactly an article but Grace Hopper's 1978 HOPL keynote makes for good reading: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/800025.1198341 .. she rails against the then 'Establishment' and thinks back to days when people thought assembly language was a bit fancy and modern. There's a lot about the earliest days of programming in her keynote.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#35

Post by carapace »

"Computer Lib/Dream Machines"

> ...is a 1974 book by Ted Nelson, printed as a two-front-cover paperback to indicate its "intertwingled" nature. Originally self-published by Nelson, it was republished with a foreword by Stewart Brand in 1987 by Microsoft Press.

> In Steven Levy's book Hackers, Computer Lib is described as "the epic of the computer revolution, the bible of the hacker dream. [Nelson] was stubborn enough to publish it when no one else seemed to think it was a good idea."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Lib/Dream_Machines

Buy directly from the author: https://computerlibbook.com/ it says it's "sold out" for now.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#36

Post by kbr2000 »

I can recommend to get a copy of

* Datapoint: The Lost Story of the Texans Who Invented the Personal Computer Revolution, by Lamont Wood.

* The Soul of A New Machine, by Tracy Kidder.

* Books by George Dyson (son of ...): Darwin Among the Machines, Turing's Cathedral. (unrelated, but also give Project Orion: The Atomic Spaceship a go)

* The Man Behind the Microchip: Robert Noyce and the Invention of Silicon Valley, by Leslie Berlin.

* Richard Feynman Computer Heuristics Lecture at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

* Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing, by Thierry Bardini.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#37

Post by adamfeldman »

The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier

Published in 1992, released on the Internet as a free ebook in 1994.

"The book discusses watershed events in the hacker subculture in the early 1990s. The most notable topic covered is Operation Sundevil and the events surrounding the 1987–1990 war on the Legion of Doom network: the raid on Steve Jackson Games, the trial of "Knight Lightning" (one of the original journalists of Phrack), and the subsequent formation of the Electronic Frontier Foundation."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hacker_Crackdown

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#40

Post by password4321 »

khaledh wrote: post #11

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. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281

Also List of computer history videos, documentaries and related folklore (2018)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22841022

https://github.com/watson/awesome-computer-history

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