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Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?

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Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?

#43

Post by chubot »

- Paypal Wars. I read this twice -- once back in 2006 or so, before I really knew who any of the people were (Thiel, Musk, etc.). And then once a few years ago.

- Chaos Monkeys -- about Facebook circa 2010, touches on YC a few years before that. Somewhat controversial, but a good book.

- Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee -- talks about the story from CERN to MIT, etc.

Echoing some other posts:

- The Idea Factory

- The Dream Machine (probably the densest and most informative computer history book I've read)

- Masters of Doom

- The Supermen (about Seymour Cray) -- I didn't know anything about this side of the industry! Interesting.

Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?

#44

Post by mindcrime »

Maybe not perfect matches, but a few titles I'm familiar with that you might like:

Dreaming in Code - covers Mitch Kapor's post Lotus effort to build Chandler.

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

Everyone Else Must Fail - all about Larry Ellison and Oracle

https://www.amazon.com/Everyone-Else-Must-Fail-Unvarnished/d...

Winners, Losers & Microsoft - title says it all

https://www.amazon.com/Winners-Losers-Microsoft-Competition-...

Two books by Bill Gates:

Business At The Speed of Thought

https://www.amazon.com/Business-Speed-Thought-Succeeding-Dig...

and

The Road Ahead

https://www.amazon.com/Road-Ahead-Completely-Up-Date/dp/0140...

Also:

MCI: Failure Is Not An Option

https://www.amazon.com/MCI-Failure-Invented-Competition-Tele...

Already mentioned, but I feel obligated to add another +1 for these three:

The Soul of a New Machine - Kidder

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution - Levy

The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - Gertner

Also, if you enjoy this kind of stuff, you might enjoy the AMC series Halt and Catch Fire. Yes it's fiction and highly dramatized, but it captures a lot of the spirit of the times from the beginnings of the PC era up through the Dot Com Bubble era.

Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?

#47

Post by kar1181 »

pmulv wrote: post #2

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…

Agreed, it's one of my favourite books of all time.

Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?

#48

Post by jordanab »

- "Startupland: How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business"

I just finished this, and really enjoyed it. It's about the founding of Zendesk. I personally liked it's perspective because it's founders were 30 somethings (instead of the usual out of college types), and they are from Europe.

I also really enjoyed:

- "Hatching Twitter: A True Story of Money, Power, Friendship, and Betrayal"

- "The Airbnb Story: How Three Ordinary Guys Disrupted an Industry, Made Billions and Created Plenty of Controversy"

Re: Ask HN: Recommendations on books and documentaries on tech companies/people?

#49

Post by romanovcode »

I've really enjoyed "Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble".

It's more about people/companies but it still fits, also it's super funny, especially if you've been working in this kind of environment and can relate to a lot of things said in the book.

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