Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?

Also on computer architecture / story of developing a new processor, "The Pentium Chronicles" by Robert Colwell is a really interesting book on the story of the Pentium Pro, the first out-of-order CPU from Intel.

It's an extremely well written book, starting from the very beginning at the time of WWII, tracing people, ideas, struggles, and achievements of great milestones in computer history. It's not your typical dry historical material, but somehow the author made it personal through the eyes of key people that influenced important computer science progresses, and in particular J.C.R. Licklider (Lick), who galvanized a lot efforts across the U.S. in the sixties that resulted in making computing interactive and ultimately personal, rather than batch and business-focused. Many important milestones are discussed, starting with the early days of mechanical computers, vacuum tubes, relays, ENIAC, UNIVAC, through MIT's various efforts during the cold war to help with real-time computing with Whirlwind and the SAGE project; IBM's mainframes dominance in the fifties, and the hacker culture that arose against it at MIT to build interactive computers like the TX-0 and TX-2, to the spin-off of DEC and its minicomputers that changed the game; to building time-sharing systems, and the groundbreaking inventions of Douglas Engelbart and his team at SRI; the rise of the ARPA network; the many great ideas developed at Xerox PARC; and ultimately the personal computer revolution and the Internet.

I also enjoyed "Masterminds of Programming: Conversations With The Creators Of Major Programming Languages" [0]

It's a collection of interviews with creators of languages (FORTH, C++, Python, Haskell, and many more) You learn a lot about language design decisions and their pitfalls.

And a shameless plug: I shared MapFilterFold as a Show HN earlier, a project that collects recommendations from Ask HN threads. Browsing the books tagged computer science might yield some interesting results[1]

[0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596515170/

[1] https://mapfilterfold.com/books/?genre=computer%20science

[0] https://www.joelonsoftware.com/

It's a modern classic (2000). It's less technical and more about the history behind the idea/theories of coding itself. It also explains some basic principles of how computers work, at a high level. Very well written.