computer history books

Just finished "Where wizards stay up late, the origin of the internet" And I like how it was still somewhat technical while telling the story of the creation of the internet. does lainons knows anything else like it?

Yeah check out Birth of a New Machine, or Cyberia.

>>7081 Sorry that's SOUL of a new machine, not birth...

>>7080 I've never heard of this book prior to this. Do you have link to pdf?

I've not read that book, but I'll recommend Alan Turing's Electronic Brain: https://global.oup.com/academic/product/alan-turings-electronic-brain-9780199609154 This book details the work of Alan Turing and others, largely relating to the National Physical Laboratory (NPL) of Teddington, with a heavy focus on the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE) project built for the Mathematics Division, to which Alan Turing would later join and contribute a design. Follows is my favorite passage from this book: >Optimum coding-good or bad? It led to very fast routines but we could overdo it! I recall that when a built-in divider was available on DEUCE, I explored the usual iterative method for finding square roots to replace our digit-by-digit method learned at school. I found that for a floating point number x in the range 1/2 - 2, a starting guess of a + x/2 gave full accuracy through the range with, if I recall correctly, three iterations. The value for a was around 0.48. By chance, I spotted an instruction which when converted to decimal was about this size, so I used it to save a store. Some time later, a puzzled user had considerable difficulty in understanding my inadequately documented routine.

>>7081 >>7084 Thanks I'll check those out! >>7083 Sorry only one I have is Kindle DRM'd ...

>>7083 http://libgen.rs/search.php?req=where+wizards+stay+up+late

A little earlier in history, some time ago I read "The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers."It's an interesting read that details the history of the telegraph, from its beginnings in the form of the optical telegraph to its obsolescence, how the world reacted to it at the time (spoilers: people partied so hard they accidentally set a building on fire in one celebration), and the subculture that lived on the telegram wires. Some nice parallels to modern internet and a nice look at the pre-computer "internet" so to speak.

>>7080 I read "In Search of Stupidity". It's a compilation of anecdotes, but it's a nice read.

Is this thread blocked from posting book files?

>>7080 >>7081 >>7082 >>7083 >>7084 Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon - Where Wizards Stay Up Late - The Origins of the Internet (1998).epub https://anonym.to/?https://anonfiles.com/r4X6g5Ddvd/ http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=6977F247ED68781223E7A7BAF470D697 --- Tracy Kidder - The Soul of a New Machine (2011).epub https://anonym.to/?https://anonfiles.com/x5Xcg5D1v5/ http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=D6BC1E30276F4215E01A3BB8AE5DDA65 --- Douglas Rushkoff - Cyberia - Life in the Trenches of Cyberspace (1994).epub https://anonym.to/?https://anonfiles.com/1fX6g6Ddve/ http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=42C7C8E8C31C789F3ADCDBA17D6CDC58 --- B. Jack Copeland - Alan Turing's Electronic Brain - The Struggle to Build the ACE, the World's Fastest Computer (2012).pdf.7z https://anonym.to/?https://anonfiles.com/pfcfh3Dav0/ http://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=3008822CE539E40454803843D8947ADA --- >>7124 Yes --- Steven Levy - In The Plex - How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives (2011).epub https://anonym.to/?https://anonfiles.com/h0S1hbDdv8/ https://libgen.st/book/index.php?md5=36F3AD0C9C11C9D66DEA2D790F6FA781 --- Fred Turner - From Counterculture to Cyberculture - Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and The Rise of Digital Utopianism (2006).pdf.7z https://anonym.to/?https://anonfiles.com/lfSbh2D2vd/ https://libgen.st/book/index.php?md5=6916B53A2F276602174090943602E3F2

>>7094 thanks anon I eventually found it >>7094

>>7159 >https://anonym.to/? Stop glowing so much

>>7096 Halfway through reading this. Pretty good so far, thanks for the recommendation!

>>7216 Glad you're enjoying it. Rip Claude Chappe :)

>>7164 Dipshit doesnt even know what it does

>>7080 You can't learn about computer-ing history and not know who Ted Nelson is. He gives perspective on computer use in the 70's outside of un*x echochamber. https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=384ECDE91915D17FD906DFBE5DE002F2 https://libgen.rs/book/index.php?md5=1F0AE4F24A0777970E70FD766159FCA5 >>7224 It notifies an arbitrary third party which has 0 reasons to be involved in this data exchange that you're visiting a particular link from a server that sends referers. Besides, the service is not even reachable anymore, so what's the point. If you're this much concerned with referer, why would you want to spray metadata all over the net by sending it to another site instead of destination then. Just copy and paste it in new window if you're paranoid enough to use sketchy placebos or disable referers in browser config.

>>7124 No idea. I've been asking on the "Report Bugs" thread, but no one has addressed anything there for a while.

Gleick's The Information and Dyson's Turing's Cathedral have not been mentioned before in this thread

Mythical Man Month by Frederick Brooks is definitely worth reading

>>7309 seconding the information. just finished it. glad i had a physical copy, it's kind of a tome.

Tangential perhaps, but have you read "The Mythical Man Month, Essays on Software Engineering" ?

>>7413 >>7419 I wrote a review of that, which now follows: The book being reviewed is ``The Mythical Man-Month'' by Fred Brooks (ISBN 978-0-201-83595-3). The particular edition under review is that released for the twentieth anniversary. I decided to read this book on a whim, and found it a rather leisurely read, finishing it in roughly one month, with effort taken to avoid reading it too quickly. Most of the chapters span roughly ten pages each and cover a basic idea or few of programming management; it was interesting to read about programming so different from the solitary work I do, being the creation of very large ``programming systems products'', such as operating systems. I still believe such programming simply shouldn't be done, but he does a good job of proposing various methods of making it seem pleasant and reasonable. From what I've read elsewhere, either few, or none, of these ideas are in reasonable usage anywhere. The titular issue is that idea men and months are interchangeable, not being so due to communication costs, and the book dedicates much of itself to addressing the topic in various ways; the concept of a ``surgical team'', with the primary programmer being the ``surgeon'' supported by a team, and with the final say, is very interesting, with that result being putting many people to work, but reducing the communication costs to just the surgeons. I wonder how productive I'd be, with such helping me. I agree with his assertion ``that conceptual integrity is the most important consideration in system design'', and was delighted with his acknowledging this requires one or few minds, phrasing it as an aristocracy contrasted with democracy; his suggestion of separating an architectural design from its implementation for large projects is amusing nowadays. Most of the book is anachronistic like this. The book is the source of several well-known ideas, including the second-system effect. Still, it's amusing to read it, with one example being OS/360 using twenty-six resident bytes to properly handle a date edge case. Accounts of telephone logging and microfilm documentation give a similar vibe, as does using statistics to suggest that use of a high-level language results in improved productivity, or showing the effectiveness of debugging with the machine as opposed to using core dumps and so on. The parts of the book which delve more into the act of programming are surprisingly interesting, for a book primarily concerned with management; chapter nine details issues with setting size limits, to find the programmers had overused disk accesses or made work buffers part of the interfaces; it ends with the important teaching that the data and their organization are more important than the program which manipulates them. Chapter fifteen rightfully derides flow-charts, then demonstrates a ``self-documenting program'' littered with comments, even including diagrams for control flow, and which is named by including the year it was written; I suppose a novice should be wary of much of the advice. Near the end are two versions of his essay ``No Silver Bullet'', which is concerned with how no lone technique will prevail in well attacking issues with programming. His mentions of AI, of the expert systems, and of graphical programming intrigued me. He mentions simply purchasing software is good, and it amuses me to look at the current businesses peddling superfluous garbage, using this context. I ultimately disagree with the essay, in part because I pursue a silver bullet that would refute it. I lost some respect for him, when he praised UNIX, calling it overly-documented in one instance. At times, he mentions only the big business methods, from companies known to be rotten, so don't expect novel methods to be mentioned. He mentions a conversation he'd with another who was noticed reading the book, with that reader telling the author whom he didn't recognize ``Nothing in it I didn't know already.'', when asked if it would be recommended. The anniversary edition was written for this and other reasons; I believe twenty-six additional years have perhaps been even less kind. I found this book worth reading, and it's neither a heavy investment of time nor one of money. Let it be another bludgeon against the horrible state of computing, with professionals expected to work like amateurs.

Eric Raymond’s books „The Art of Unix Programming” and „The Cathedral and the Bazaar” are a good read on the earlier days

Dealers of Lightning, Dreaming in Code, Losing the Signal, The Annotated Turing, Fire in the Valley, Big Blues, The Soul of a New Machine, The oo's Egg, The Dream Machine, In The Beginning Was The Command Line, The Man From The Future, iWoz, Skunk Works, and In Search of Stupidity are the "historic prose" tech books I've got written down to try out at some point based on online recommendations similar to where wizards stay up late. Can't vouch for their quality yet, though.