21–30 of 118 posts
Masters of Doom. Great book about John Carmack and id software.
I bought it after seeing it being recommend several times on HN. Personally, I found it rather disappointing. Sure, there are brilliant parts, but on the whole, it was a chore to finish.
I'm currently in the process of reading "Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age,"[0] and I highly recommend it. I've always viewed Xerox as primarily an office printer company, and the fact that they innovated/invented many of the systems that we still use today (ethernet, layered windows on an operating system, the mouse, bitmap displays) and then failed to market these technologies, makes…
"Pirates of the Silicon Valley" and "In the realm of the Hackers"
It details the work of a team working on a children's encyclopedia, but it also gives some very interesting insights into Microsoft's corporate culture (of the early 1990s at least) and social dynamics.
I can't recommended it enough of you are looking for stories of people and companies to how we got to where we are today.
About relationship between intellectual property and hackers
The Innovaters by Walter Issacson. It's literally about 20 biographies in one book, documenting the internet creation, and the computer, which meet in the middle in the 80s and 90s. I can't recommended it enough of you are looking for stories of people and companies to how we got to where we are today.