"It's Behind You" by Bob Pape chronicles the porting of the arcade game R-Type to the ZX Spectrum. He never published it and instead created a website where it can be downloaded freely: http://bizzley.com/ It's a great short (136pg) read on the development processes necessary back in the day to squeeze performance out of limited hardware.
Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
61–70 of 156 posts
Re: Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
#62The Computer History Museum has lots of history on line https://computerhistory.org/
The articles that I have read could use some editing, I'm guessing they were transcribed from audio recordings by people who were not computer experts.
Re: Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
#63As a follow-up, anyone have any books written about the Dotcom era? I was still fairly young at the time so I don’t remember a lot of it and I can’t find any books or shows that cover it. Lots of stuff from the 70s/80s/early 90s (Masters of Doom, Cuckoos Egg, Halt and Catch Fire, Pirates of Silicon Valley), and lots of stuff from modern Silicon Valley (Bad Blood, Silicon Valley, the various Steve Jobs movies/books) but it seems like the startup world from 1995 to 2002 is just a blank space waiting to be filled.
What about Yahoo and Amazon and Pets.com and Webvan and eBay? What about stock being used for toilet paper and employees wheeling their Aeron chairs home when the company folded? What about Enron? How did 9/11 impact the Dotcom bust? Hell, what programming languages/frameworks were they using?
Re: Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
#64Kernighan's "UNIX: A History and a Memoir" is a fun read.
I'm in the middle of this right now. It really is an interesting read. He's clear enough, and keeps out of too much detail, so a civilian can read it, but there's enough meat to be interesting to a techie.
Re: Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
#65"Code" by Charles Petzold is a great read. It describes how computers work from the bottom up, starting with how you can get electricity to do math. I've recommended it to people of all backgrounds, and everyone loves it.
Re: Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
#66A People’s History of Computing in the United States - Joy Lisi Rankin
Joy Rankin draws on detailed records to explore how users exchanged messages, programmed music and poems, fostered communities, and developed computer games like The Oregon Trail. These unsung pioneers helped shape our digital world, just as much as the inventors, garage hobbyists, and eccentric billionaires of Palo Alto.
Re: Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
#67As a follow-up, anyone have any books written about the Dotcom era? I was still fairly young at the time so I don’t remember a lot of it and I can’t find any books or shows that cover it. Lots of stuff from the 70s/80s/early 90s (Masters of Doom, Cuckoos Egg, Halt and Catch Fire, Pirates of Silicon Valley), and lots of stuff from modern Silicon Valley (Bad Blood, Silicon Valley, the various Steve Jobs movies/books) b…
"How the Internet Happened" by Brian McCullough covers the early years of the internet through the dotcom bust. He has a podcast consisting of some of the chapters for the book and interviews he did while writing.
Re: Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
#68As a follow-up, anyone have any books written about the Dotcom era? I was still fairly young at the time so I don’t remember a lot of it and I can’t find any books or shows that cover it. Lots of stuff from the 70s/80s/early 90s (Masters of Doom, Cuckoos Egg, Halt and Catch Fire, Pirates of Silicon Valley), and lots of stuff from modern Silicon Valley (Bad Blood, Silicon Valley, the various Steve Jobs movies/books) b…
Dot.con by John Cassidy: https://www.amazon.com/Dot-America-Lost-Money-Internet-ebook...
Re: Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
#69As a follow-up, anyone have any books written about the Dotcom era? I was still fairly young at the time so I don’t remember a lot of it and I can’t find any books or shows that cover it. Lots of stuff from the 70s/80s/early 90s (Masters of Doom, Cuckoos Egg, Halt and Catch Fire, Pirates of Silicon Valley), and lots of stuff from modern Silicon Valley (Bad Blood, Silicon Valley, the various Steve Jobs movies/books) b…
There was a Josh Hartnett/Adam Scott movie called August that's set in the dot-com boom. It's got fairly low reviews but I also don't think they do it justice. Some of the reviews seem to be about how it's impenetrable and hard to understand.
For some lighter fare that others in your family might also connect to, there's Ashton Kutcher's A lot like love but there the dot-com thing is just a side plot.
Also, Antitrust with Ryan Phillippe. Not specifically about the dot-com boom but roughly the same time period.
I mean none of those movies are masterpieces but I think they impart some sense of the time period.
Re: Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?
#70I thought Renegades of the Empire was a fascinating look into the internal machinations at Redmond and a bit of DirectX history too
https://www.amazon.com/Renegades-Empire-Software-Revolution-...