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

This book is really all OP needs, as it covers computing from Turing to MS-DOS. Although ostensibly a biography of Licklider, it uses him as a skeleton to tell a much wider story about the idea of the computer as an extension of the human brain (as opposed to just a fast calculator).

Maybe not just "history of computing" but I do enjoy the Kevin Mitnick books alongside with Ira WInkler. There's that subculture right alongside "Steal this book."

The introduction to Clean Agile from Bob Martin has a history on software processes as he personally recounts it.

Seconded. One of the more impressive books I've ever read, the way the author tells the story of the computer, which has a very complex history. He does a great job weaving together all the bits and pieces while also keeping it engaging and human.

It depends on what you're looking for. Do you want popular "fun" accounts or "serious" historical scholarship? Heavy on technical specifics or lighter on details and stronger on the historical big picture? All of those are fine, but the answer will mean you'll want to look in different places.

There is a active subfield of academic history of technology that deals with the history of computing. It's generally populated by professionally-trained historians who rigorously employ archival sources and tend to focus on the bigger picture, i.e. linking computing to wider historical trends and events (examples: the Cold War, Capitalism, the rise of programming as a profession, etc.). Some notable historians in this area are Mar Hicks and Nathan Ensmenger. The field is still growing and has a lot of ground to cover, but if you seek a deeper understanding (as readers of HN tend to do) then this is the place to go. Writing accurate history that also grapples with the big picture is hard, and it shouldn't be too much of a surprise that it takes specialists to do it.

There's of course an abundance of popular accounts of innovation, along the lines of Walter Isaacson's _The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution_. Academic historians of technology generally dislike these accounts because they focus on a small set of "heroic" individuals at the expense of the bigger picture. To pick on Isaacson a bit, he's generally most interested in personalities (Steve Jobs, say) and must less interested in digging deeper into the economic and social history that lies behind the "Digital Revolution". Nonetheless, these accounts sell very well, there are also tons of articles out there written in a similar vein, and there's nothing wrong with enjoying them provided you are aware that you're only getting one version of the story.

I also like some practitioner-accounts, really more memoir than history; they give you a nice sense of what it was like to live through a particular set of changes and to be part of building systems that we now take for granted. A good recent example, if you are interested in the genesis of UNIX, is Brian Kernighan's _Unix: A History and a Memoir_. Some excellent journalistic "on the ground" accounts also fall into this category of giving you a sense of what it was like to be there. The Soul of A New Machine, by Tracy Kidder is a good example.

Finally, there is some very good general history of technology that doesn't focus exclusively on computing. An example is the superb _The Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900_ by David Edgerton (polemical, controversial, easy to read, and even if you disagree with his argument it will likely change how you see technology forever).