This is a book I finished a while back. I haven't had a chance to read or write much lately. Anyway this book is a good anecdotal telling of the development of the personal computer. It is a collection of stories about the various people involved in the development of the personal computer.

It starts with the story of the labs at Stanford and people like Doug Englebart and his amazing demo of inventions that introduced many of the commonplace technologies that we rely on today. And it takes you all the way up to XEROX PARC, Homebrew Computer club, the founding of Apple and Microsoft.

The part I enjoyed the most was near the end when the book was telling the stories from the Homebrew Computer club. This is where everything was really starting to come together in a package that was suitable for an individual owner and user. It also explains (at least I think) where the roots of the anti-Microsoft mentality comes from in the open source community. The story goes; Bill Gates brings MS-Basic and demos it at a Homebrew meeting and someone takes a copy and gives it to everyone in the group and it gets further shared from there (like the club always had with technology in the past). This sharing angers Bill Gates and causes him to lash out in a series of letters to the club. And I think the bad feelings and mistrust have just grown from there by further actions on both sides considering a number of the members in the club went on to become figures in both commercial industry and open source.

The only part of the book that I didn't really like is how it kept trying to tie drug use in as often as possible as if it was a centrally driving factor in the innovation of the time. I don't think it is that surprising that people experimented with drugs in the 60's and 70's.

Markoff, J. (2006). What the dormouse said: How the sixties counterculture shaped the personal computer industry. New York: Penguin Books.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/64695919

I finished this book a little while ago and it is a must read for any open source enthusiast. It is a collection of essays from a number of well know names in the open source software movement. I found all of the essays very interesting to read and they fit together nicely as a cohesive work.

The essays together were structured in a way that tells a good bit of history of the computer industry at large and open source's influence throughout. Several the essays discuss open source as a successful business model, which I found particularly interesting. Leaders from companies like Red Hat discussed how they got started and managed to become profitable.

I also got a good perspective on the foundations of open source ideals and what events in history led up to the creation of things like the GNU project and the GPL.

The thing I found most interesting was that most of the authors made predictions for the future of open source in their writing and I got to see what the mentality for the movement was at the time. With me reading it nine years or so later I could gauge how these predictions were panning out and what common threads there are in today's open source mentality. It was about half and half on the predictions I thought. Half had been (or were well on there way to being) realized and the other half had yet to come.

There is a follow up book to this and I am looking forward to getting into it as soon as my reading list lightens up a little.

DiBona, C., Ockman, S., & Stone, M. (1999). Open sources: voices from the open source revolution. Beijing: O'Reilly.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/40889566

I finished reading this book a few months ago and I wanted to write a little something up about it. I liked how the author started with the really basic concept of binary numbering systems and then gently built complexity on top of it to describe modern computational theory. I was also impressed by how well the author used easy to understand examples to describe some very complex ideas.

I would highly recommend the first half of the book to even a casual computer user (who wanted to better understand the mind of the computer geek in your life). However towards the middle the content gets a little heavy for the casual reader. Also you could tell that the author wrote most of the book early on and then when he finally tried to put it together for publishing a lot had developed in the computer industry. You could tell because the last few chapters felt as if they were just thrown in and tried to quickly cover both the ideas of a GUI and the Internet.

On the whole I would say it is a good read but I wouldn't put it to the top of your list.

Petzold, C. (2000). Code: the hidden language of computer hardware and software. Redmond, Wash: Microsoft Press.
http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/45355686