etc., from batch processing to timesharing, Project MAC, Multics, Unix, Ken Thompson and Dennis Richie at Bell Labs, PARC and the Alto, the ARPANET, the birth of personal computing, up to the end of the 1990s and the Internet boom. Despite the book’s title suggesting it is a biography of ‘Lick’, as his friends and co-workers called him, it goes much further and tells the history of electronic computing from the early beginnings in the 1950s starting with Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann, Claude Shannon, etc. And then, this book, published in 2001 and almost 10 years in the making, is a monumental piece of work that takes quite some time to read and enjoy all by itself.Ī voluminous book with over 500 pages in rather small print is not something for a weekend. The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing kept me from making quick progress as I literally spent 6 weeks on that in summer. Mitchell Waldrop, a computing history book focusing on the life of J. Back in June I started reading ‘The Dream Machine’ by M. It’s been six months since my last book review on computing history and there are a number of reasons for it.
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