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The dream machine, and Steven Levy’s other books (Crypto and Facebook) are also really good.

Code by Charles Petzold is mostly not about history, but it uses a lot of computing history as part of the way it teaches.

Microserfs is fiction but captures what it feels like to work in the Bay Area imo.



I'm reading The Dream Machine now (just got to the part about PARC), and I agree, it's very good, especially in its descriptions of the social and cultural aspects of the innovations that led to personal computing. The recent Stripe Press reissue [1] includes some of J.C.R. Licklider's writings at the end, a nice bonus.

[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine


Crypto is a great read. Seeing cryptography progress from something that only spooks care about to technology vital for the commercial internet is covered really well and you also get to learn a little about the characters involved.




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