This afternoon I gave a talk (slides) at the Brunswick Community Library on “The History of Computing in 50 Books”. The history of computing is one of my favorite subjects, and I’ve been reading about it almost as long as I’ve been using computers, over three decades now. Putting together the talk was a lot of fun. It was also a great excuse to scour the UHLS catalog for books I didn’t know about. I found and read some great ones, like Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers from the Computer History Museum and Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom. Most of the books in my list were popular histories, with a smattering of novels (like Neal Stephenson’s Baroque cycle) and even one children’s book (Margaret and the Moon by Dean Robbins and Lucy Knisley).
The complete list:
| Author(s) | Title |
|---|---|
| Keith Houston | Empire of the Sum: The Rise and Reign of the Pocket Calculator |
| Charles Petzold | The Lost Art of Logarithms (in progress) |
| Neal Stephenson | Baroque Cycle (3 books) |
| Sydney Padua | Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage |
| Charles Petzold | Computer of the Tides |
| Vannevar Bush | Pieces of the Action |
| Andrew Hodges | Alan Turing: The Enigma |
| Charles Petzold | The Annotated Turing |
| Harry R. Lewis (ed.) | Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science |
| Jimmy Soni and Rob Goodman | A Mind at Play: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age |
| Jon Gertner | The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation |
| Raúl Rojas and Ulf Hashhagen | The First Computers–History and Architectures |
| Raúl Rojas | Konrad Zuse’s Early Computers: The Quest for the Computer in Germany |
| Jane Smiley | The Man Who Invented the Computer: The Biography of John Atanasoff, Digital Pioneer |
| David A. Price | Geniuses at War: Bletchley Park, Colossus, and the Dawn of the Digital Age |
| Neal Stephenson | Cryptonomicon |
| David Kahn | The Codebreakers – The Story of Secret Writing |
| John Alderman | Core Memory: A Visual Survey of Vintage Computers |
| Martin Campbell-Kelly, William Aspray, Nathan Ensmenger, Jeffrey R. Yost | Computer : a History of the Information Machine |
| William Aspray | John von Neumann and the Origins of Modern Computing |
| George Dyson | Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe |
| Joel Shurkin | Broken Genius: The Rise and Fall of William Shockley, Creator of the Electronic Age |
| Charles Petzold | Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software |
| Kurt Beyer | Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age |
| Martin Campbell-Kelly | From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry |
| Lance Fortnow | The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible |
| Margot Lee Shetterly | Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race |
| Dean Robbins | Margaret and the Moon |
| Charles Murray | The Supermen: The Story of Seymour Cray and the Technical Wizards Behind the Supercomputer |
| Tracy Kidder | The Soul of a New Machine |
| Mitchell Waldrop | The Dream Machine |
| Katie Hafner | Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet |
| John Markoff | What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry |
| Ted Nelson | Possiplex |
| Michael Hiltzik | Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age |
| Steven Levy | Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer that Changed Everything |
| Steven Levy | Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution |
| Walter Isaacson | The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution |
| Leslie Berlin | Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age |
| David Kushner and Koren Shadmi | Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: Pong, Atari, and the Dawn of the Video Game |
| Box Brown | Tetris: The Games People Play |
| Brian Bagnall | Commodore: A Company on the Edge |
| Jaron Lanier | Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality |
| William Gibson | Neuromancer |
| Neal Stephenson | Snow Crash |
| Adam Fisher | Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley (As Told by the Hackers, Founders, and Freaks Who Made It Boom) |
| Michael Lewis | The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story |
| Christopher Tozzi | For Fun and Profit: A History of the Free and Open Source Software Revolution |