The Best Computers & Technology History Books 2024

1. Government Policy toward Open Source Software (Paperback)

"A Brookings Institution Press and American Enterprise Institute publication Can open source software--software that is usually available without charge and that individuals are free to modify--survive against the fierce competition of proprietary software, such as Microsoft Windows? Should the government intervene on its behalf? This book addresses a host of issues raised by the rapid growth of open source software, including government subsidies for research and development, government procurement policy, and patent and copyright policy. Contributors offer diverse perspectives on a phenomenon that has become a lightning rod for controversy in the field of information technology. Contributors include James Bessen (Research on Innovation), David S. Evans (National Economic Research Associates), Lawrence Lessig (Stanford University), Bradford L. Smith (Microsoft Corporation), and Robert W. Hahn (director, AEI-Brookings Joint Center). "

" A Brookings Institution Press and American Enterprise Institute publication Can open source softwaresoftware that is usually available without charge and that individuals are free to modifysurvive against the fierce competition of proprietary software, such as Microsoft Windows? Should the government intervene on its behalf? This book addresses a host of issues raised by the rapid growth of open source software, including government subsidies for research and development, government procurement policy, and patent and copyright policy. Contributors offer diverse perspectives on a phenomenon that has become a lightning rod for controversy in the field of information technology. Contributors include James Bessen (Research on Innovation), David S. Evans (National Economic Research Associates), Lawrence Lessig (Stanford University), Bradford L. Smith (Microsoft Corporation), and Robert W. Hahn (director, AEI-Brookings Joint Center). "

2. The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

Pre-Owned - Following his blockbuster biography of Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson's New York Times bestselling and critically acclaimed The Innovators is a riveting, propulsive, and at times deeply moving (The Atlantic) story of the people who created the computer and the Internet. What were the talents that allowed certain inventors and entrepreneurs to turn their visionary ideas into disruptive realities? What led to their creative leaps? Why did some succeed and others fail? The Innovators is a masterly saga of collaborative genius destined to be the standard history of the digital revolution--and an indispensable guide to how innovation really happens. Isaacson begins the adventure with Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, who pioneered computer programming in the 1840s. He explores the fascinating personalities that created our current digital revolution, such as Vannevar Bush, Alan Turing, John von Neumann, J.C.R. Licklider, Doug Engelbart, Robert Noyce, Bill Gates, Steve Wozniak, Steve Jobs, Tim Berners-Lee, and Larry Page. This is the story of how their minds worked and what made them so inventive. It's also a narrative of how their ability to collaborate and master the art of teamwork made them even more creative. For an era that seeks to foster innovation, creativity, and teamwork, The Innovators is a sweeping and surprisingly tenderhearted history of the digital age (The New York Times).

The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

3. The Soul of a New Machine, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

Pre-Owned - Pulitzer Prize winner Tracy Kidder memorably records the drama, comedy, and excitement of one company's efforts to bring a new microcomputer to market. Computers have changed since 1981, when The Soul of a New Machine first examined the culture of the computer revolution. What has not changed is the feverish pace of the high-tech industry, the go-for-broke approach to business that has caused so many computer companies to win big (or go belly up), and the cult of pursuing mind-bending technological innovations. The Soul of a New Machine is an essential chapter in the history of the machine that revolutionized the world in the twentieth century.

The Soul of a New Machine, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

4. Accidental Empires, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

Pre-Owned - Computer manufacturing is-after cars, energy production, and illegal drugs-the largest industry in the world and its one of the last great success stories in American business. Cringely presents the history of that industry, focusing as much on the astoundingly odd personalities at its core and the hacker culture they spawned as it does on the remarkable technology they created. Accidental Empires documents the uniquely American saga of creativity ad ego that is at once uproarious, shocking, and inspiring.

Accidental Empires, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

5. Only the Paranoid Survive, Pre-Owned (Hardcover)

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Only the Paranoid Survive, Pre-Owned (Hardcover)

6. Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

Pre-Owned - A Wall Street Journal Best Business Book of 2012 A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2012 In this revealing account of how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II, George Dyson illuminates the nature of digital computers, the lives of those who brought them into existence, and how code took over the world. In the 1940s and '50s, a small group of men and women--led by John von Neumann--gathered in Princeton, New Jersey, to begin building one of the first computers to realize Alan Turing's vision of a Universal Machine. The codes unleashed within this embryonic, 5-kilobyte universe--less memory than is allocated to displaying a single icon on a computer screen today--broke the distinction between numbers that mean things and numbers that do things, and our universe would never be the same. Turing's Cathedral is the story of how the most constructive and most destructive of twentieth-century inventions--the digital computer and the hydrogen bomb--emerged at the same time.

Turing's Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

7. Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film "The Imitation Game", Pre-Owned (Paperback)

Pre-Owned - A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The official book behind the Academy Award-winning film The Imitation Game, starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley It is only a slight exaggeration to say that the British mathematician Alan Turing (1912-1954) saved the Allies from the Nazis, invented the computer and artificial intelligence, and anticipated gay liberation by decades--all before his suicide at age forty-one. This New York Times-bestselling biography of the founder of computer science, with a new preface by the author that addresses Turing's royal pardon in 2013, is the definitive account of an extraordinary mind and life. Capturing both the inner and outer drama of Turing's life, Andrew Hodges tells how Turing's revolutionary idea of 1936--the concept of a universal machine--laid the foundation for the modern computer and how Turing brought the idea to practical realization in 1945 with his electronic design. The book also tells how this work was directly related to Turing's leading role in breaking the German Enigma ciphers during World War II, a scientific triumph that was critical to Allied victory in the Atlantic. At the same time, this is the tragic account of a man who, despite his wartime service, was eventually arrested, stripped of his security clearance, and forced to undergo a humiliating treatment program--all for trying to live honestly in a society that defined homosexuality as a crime. The inspiration for a major motion picture starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley, Alan Turing: The Enigma is a gripping story of mathematics, computers, cryptography, and homosexual persecution.

Alan Turing: The Enigma: The Book That Inspired the Film "The Imitation Game", Pre-Owned (Paperback)

8. Necessary But Not Sufficient, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

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Necessary But Not Sufficient, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

9. The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, Pre-Owned (Hardcover)

Pre-Owned - The secret history of the invention that changed everything-and became the most profitable product in the world. NATIONAL BESTSELLERShortlisted for the Financial Times Business Book of the Year Award One of the Best Business Books of 2016 - CNBC, Bloomberg, 1-800-CEO-Read The One Device is a tour de force, with a fast-paced edge and heaps of analytical insight. -Ashlee Vance, New York Times bestselling author of Elon Musk A stunning book. You will never look at your iPhone the same way again. -Dan Lyons, New York Times bestselling author of Disrupted Odds are that as you read this, an iPhone is within reach. But before Steve Jobs introduced us to the one device, as he called it, a cell phone was merely what you used to make calls on the go. How did the iPhone transform our world and turn Apple into the most valuable company ever? Veteran technology journalist Brian Merchant reveals the inside story you won't hear from Cupertino-based on his exclusive interviews with the engineers, inventors, and developers who guided every stage of the iPhone's creation. This deep dive takes you from inside One Infinite Loop to 19th century France to WWII America, from the driest place on earth to a Kenyan pit of toxic e-waste, and even deep inside Shenzhen's notorious suicide factories. It's a firsthand look at how the cutting-edge tech that makes the world work-touch screens, motion trackers, and even AI-made their way into our pockets. The One Device is a roadmap for design and engineering genius, an anthropology of the modern age, and an unprecedented view into one of the most secretive companies in history. This is the untold account, ten years in the making, of the device that changed everything.

The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone, Pre-Owned (Hardcover)

10. Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code, Pre-Owned (Paperback)

Pre-Owned - The nonfiction debut from the author of the international bestseller Sacred Games about the surprising overlap between writing and computer coding Vikram Chandra has been a computer programmer for almost as long as he has been a novelist. In this extraordinary new book, his first work of nonfiction, he searches for the connections between the worlds of art and technology. Coders are obsessed with elegance and style, just as writers are, but do the words mean the same thing to both? Can we ascribe beauty to the craft of writing code? Exploring such varied topics as logic gates and literary modernism, the machismo of tech geeks, the omnipresence of an Indian Mafia in Silicon Valley, and the writings of the eleventh-century Kashmiri thinker Abhinavagupta, Geek Sublime is both an idiosyncratic history of coding and a fascinating meditation on the writer's art. Part literary essay, part technology story, and part memoir, it is an engrossing, original, and heady book of sweeping ideas.

Mirrored Mind: My Life in Letters and Code, Pre-Owned (Paperback)