Computer history books

TidBITS Talk
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Continuing the discussion from Adobe Co-Founder Charles Geschke Dead at 81:

Two more computer history books that I always recommend to others:

  • Fire In The Valley, by Michael Swaine and Paul Freiberger.

    This focuses more on the people and personalities than on the tech itself, but it’s a really great read.

  • Revolution In The Valley, by Andy Hertzfeld.

    Focuses entirely on development of the Mac. Based on all of the great anecdotes available from his web site, https://www.folklore.org/.

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Oh man, Revolution in the Valley is a wonderful book!

The Folklore website you mention is already awesome, but just seeing all those photos on the pages of a hardbound book makes it a better reading experience yet, IMHO.

I hadn’t yet heard of Fire in the Valley, so that’s on my reading list now. :slight_smile:

Thanks, David!

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An excellent biography of Ada Byron, Lady Lovelace that went into clearly explained detail about her revolutionary “thinking machine,” how it was developed, and what it could do. I read it in the 1980s-90s, and I cannot remember its exact name, but it could be this one:

Alan Turing: The Enigma. It’s an excellent, thoroughly compelling read. However, it does go into great detail about all his mathematical revelations, which went over my non-technical head, but everything else was exceptionally compelling, groundbreaking, and ultimately tragic:

In addition to “Steve Jobs” is Walter Isaacson’s “The Innovators:”

Though they are not strictly computer history books, Walter Isaacson’s wonderful bios of Leonardo Da Vinci and Ben Franklin go into detail about their innovations in engineering and science:

I’ve got his Einstein bio on my “to read” list:

And also on my list is Code Girls:

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