Computing History Bibliography
I have been interested in computing history for many years now, and I’m still often surprised how deep the literature on the subject is. I’ve had the good fortune of discovering and being told about many amazing books in the field, I’m lucky enough to have gone to a university with a world class library system, so many of these I just found by browsing LoC sections of interest. I’ve collected the ones that stood out to me together into a big list to hopefully help out others who are interested. Thankfully, many of these titles have been scanned, or are widely available in regional library systems through WorldCat. For the WorldCat links, be sure to click “All Libraries”; why this isn’t the default is beyond me. Additionally, there may be a website that ends in gen, and starts with lib, that may have PDFs of most of these titles, but you didn’t hear that from me as it’s not exactly lawful. I’ve tried to group the titles by general vibe, but besides that, there’s no specific order.
Travels in Computerland – Ben Ross Schneider
In 1974, English professor Ben Ross Schneider set out to create a searchable database of The London Stage, a tome of performance records from 18th century London theaters. He accomplished this with what was incredibly new technology: mainframe computers. However, he’s an outsider to this world of “Computer Men”, and so the process goes less than smoothly. It is written in a very charming and unique style for computing history (he has a flair for the dramatic), and provides a great look into one of the first large applications written for a literary purpose, and almost certainly the first one made by a total outsider.
Check this one out if you like: nitty-gritty logistics, literary flair, or learning what people actually did with all those mainframes.
Computer Lib/Dream Machines – Ted Nelson
If the words “Mainframe Zine” mean anything to you, than this book is a must read. It centers around the nascent concept of Personal Computing, which was accessible to few people in its pre-microcomputer world. Nelson’s goal is to demystify computing to the masses, and show what computing actually is, and how to not fall for the hype and lies of big-business. Its analog zine aesthetic, pen sketches, and personable, almost punk, yet still highly technical writing style make it instantly endearing. I found myself shocked by how many things he got right, and entertained by what he got wrong (the section on TRAC is a huge miss lol).
I liked this book so much I actually re-scanned it in higher resolutions, and made a post on the process of doing so!
Check this one out if you like: The Barnard Zine Library, terminals, and parallel play.
Digital Deli – The Lunch Group
This 1984 book is a collection of short essays that offer a cross section into both the technical and social aspects early PC culture, especially in the New York literary world. I like this one because the format enables a super broad cross-section of the scene at the time, and covering people outside of the usual computing suspects. Plus, what other book would have Stan Veit, “Stephen Wozniak”, David Nimmons, Robert Moog, and Nolan Bushnell sharing column inches? Finally, the layout and graphic design is uniquely charming (try to get a copy from a local library or ILL if you can, the Archive.org scans just aren’t the same experience).
Check this one out if you like: sandwiches, Osborns, or computers for the rest of us.
Soul of a New Machine – Tracy Kidder
Soul an absolute classic of the business side of computer histories. Kidder embeds into an engineering team at Boston area minicomputer manufacturer Data General as they create a new hardware platform. This was highly popular and influential at the time (it won a Pulitzer!), and remains a cornerstone of histories of the era. It’s also bittersweet to the modern reader, as this released at the peak of both Data General and minicomputers in general, both of which would be on their way out by the end of the decade.
Check this one out if you like: team dynamics, Massachusetts, or audiobooks (the narrator is great).
Exploring the Internet – Carl Malamud
This is one that toes the line quite well between ~valuable tech history primary source~ and simply an enjoyable book to read. Malamud is a mission to make the ITU standards document collection available on the nascent internet, despite the bureaucracy’s best efforts. As part of this, he is sent literally around the world to distribute digital copies of the standards, and perform a survey of the best connected places in each country he visits. Each chapter starts in a travelog style, then has a profile of the countries’ network and the personalities that run it. This book was written at a fascinating time in internet history, where the entire world was months away from full interconnection. Because of this, the net was still extremely regional (some places only had ONE modem connection for the entire country to share) and not yet standardized around TCP/IP. He even visited CERN, IN 1994, and does not mention the WWW once, which shows how sudden its rise truly was. Perhaps my opinion is colored from having read my library bound copy next to a pool in Florida, but I had a lot fun with this one; his writing style evokes mid-century travel literature with its lush descriptions of exotic places and technologies.
Check this one of if you like: pre-WWW internet, misadventure, and bureaucracy-play.
A Quarter Century of UNIX – Herman Goldstine and Peter H. Salus
Sometimes the best histories are written long after the face, once all the interpretations have settled, and we’ve figured out what the hell it all means. Other times, histories more contemporary to the events are helpful, before the events have compressed and primary sources have faded away. AQCU is in the second category, covering what I think of as the first and second eras of UNIX: its creation at Bell Labs, through becoming ubiquitous in workstations and internet infrastructure, to its weirdness during the 1990s. Rich in primary sourcing and oral histories, it’s an illuminating source on the strange circumstances that caused UNIX to be so successful, and provides a lot of stories and anecdotes, while still staying quite technical on development details.
Checking this one out if you like: The Bell System, grad student labor, and tapes.
Zen and the Art of the Macintosh – Michael Green
As I write this, I realize I don’t actually know where the Zen and the Art of X trope comes from. What I do know, is that this coffee table-esqe tome contains some of the most gorgeous pixel art I’ve ever seen, while predating the term by at least a decade. The book is split evenly between full page prints, technical details on how to make art on early Macintoshes (this came out around the release of the 512k), and musings on what its like to make art on a platform like the Mac – all illuminated with highly detailed, Buddhist inspired art. I highly recommend reading a physical copy of this one if you can, the scans are nice but it’s a lovely experience to read.
Check this one out if you like: MacPaint, motorcycle maintenance, and A E S T H E T I C S
Bit International
This one is a little tough to explain, so I will outsource to Wikipedia: “Bit International is a multilingual journal for visual research and media theory that was published by the Gallery of Contemporary Art in Zagreb from 1968 until 1972 as part of the so-called New Tendencies (1961–1973).” This index and this museum blurb offers some great information which I won’t try to summarize, but I was struck by the fact that it is relatively accessible theory relating to computers, art, and information flow from a time in which that field was incredibly nascent. Such high concept computer usage is relatively rare from Eastern Europe in that time, and its semi-modernist aesthetics are incredibly striking. Unfortunately, many of the the articles are in Croatian, and French, and the physical copies have some interesting semi-transparent printing that aren’t present in the scans, but I was shocked that they were online at all.
Checking this one out if you like: Croatia, Sesame Street, and C O M P U T E R A R T
P.S. I found this…streetware store that has art from it on a hoodie???
P.P.S I just stumbled on this magazine in the library stacks, but I am presently realizing this may be a bigger deal than I thought
Apple T-shirts – Gordon Thygeson
Pre-Jobs-resurrection Apple had a tradition of making t-shirts to mark events, teams, and if this book is anything to go off of, damn near anything. This collection of photos shows off designs are so charming, and have that classic Apple flair. They also serve as evidence of a lot of internal Apple processes and events, which can be quite interesting for someone who already has some background info on the company in this era. An enjoyable one to page through, I wish I could get many of these shirts today.
Check this one out if you like: dunking on John Scully, inside jokes, and dogcows.
WE Magazine
GOD this title is hard to search for.
We is an internal magazine/journal for Western Electric employees from around what could be considered the apex of The Bell System’s influence and power. Their publications are incredibly well produced, and are a lot of fun to page through for the type of woman who feels an inexplicable connection to an extinct monopoly. I like the photos in these as much, if not more, than the articles. It may be propaganda, but at least it’s visually interesting propaganda. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be a complete archive online; maybe someone needs to spend a day at the NYPL with a bag of dimes making copies of the editions they have.
Check the one out if you like: 70s fashion, linemen, and bureaucracy-play
AN/FSQ-7: the computer that shaped the Cold War – Bernd Ulmann
The title of this book reflects what’s inside: detail to the extreme. It has in depth information on not only how this computer was built, but why it was designed, where it was run, how it was used/modified over the years, and even has detailed schematics on the high speed vacuum tube logic circuits that made it up. This book is truly a labor of love to a computer that, from where I’m standing, was a bit of a technological dead-end. There are tons of sections that highlight the incredible innovation of the computer industry of that time, my favorite is how visualizations were projected by live developing film snapshots of a CRT.
Check this one out if you like: Cold-war histories, electrical engineering, or Maine
Exploding the Phone – Phil Lapsley
| Archive.org PDF with questionable layout | Another Archive.org with a somehow different bad layout |
| WorldCat |
Phone phreaks are catnip to tech historians, I think due to a combination of it countercultural, touching many parts of society, being well primary sourced, and being the illusive victimless crime that is exciting without being cruel. Exploding the Phone is the best book on phreaking I’ve read yet. While it can be a little biased towards the phreaks, as the author was in the community, who wouldn’t be on their side? The storytelling is anecdote heavy, which I think is fitting for the subject, and covers a pretty long amount of time. You’ll learn plenty about the telephone network of the era, and it’s a real page turner. My favorite memory with this is walking around Rutgers University listening to the audiobook while waiting for my NJ Transit train after a meetup.
From Betamax to Blockbuster – Joshua M. Greenberg
The videotape is one of the technologies that had the least technological change, but most social change over its existence. Video shifted from a way of time-shifting television, to a vehicle for pre-recorded rentals, before settling into tapes that people owned outright. This book documents a subculture that I had no idea even existed: the American videophile. It covers the late 70s and early 80s movement of people who would swap home-recordings of TV shows with each other through newsletters and conventions, and the culture that grew around it. It then evolves into the explosion of mom-and-pop video rental stores, how they were operated, and the effects they had on the industry. Written in the style of long-form reporting, it does a great job in showing the movements that made video into the truly ubiquitous tech of the 90s and 00s.
Check this one out if you like: nerd-conventions, expensive VCRs, or copyright law
Ghost in the Wires – Kevin Mitnick
I read this when I was in middle school, and haven’t really come back to it since. Kevin Mitnick is a name that is well known in the hacker community for being one of the first really high profile hackers to be prosecuted in the United States. As this is his memoir, I think it should be taken with some healthy grains of salt, and the technical details leave a lot to be desired. Honestly, I don’t know what to think since it’s been, 10 or 12 years since I read it, but no list like this would be complete without it.
Cuckoo’s Egg – Cliff Stoll
This is another mass market title I’m putting on here less because I think you have to read it, but more because it seems like everyone either has read this book, or knows the story. It’s a story of some of the first computer espionage that ever spilled into the civilian world, and made quite the impact when first released. Stoll than released another book which was…less well received. This is another one I read in middle school and never came back to, but I remembering it being a pretty engaging story, so let me know if it holds up!