Content tagged with "tech-history"

I didn’t quite know what to do with this book. I think it was recommended to me by someone. It’s a collection of essays about invention, innovation, and engineering. I read a half-dozen of them before bailing out. It was weird – I couldn’t figure out any thematic consistency to them. Then I realized…

This is really a collection of writings, published elsewhere, about Vannevar Bush’s seminal 1945 essay “How We May Think,” and the idea of the Memex which he proposed. I suspect everyone who reads this book will enjoy it, because you have to be pretty interested in Bush to even want to read this. It…

I have no idea why I bought this book. Honestly, I don’t even remember buying it. The book is a … call to a new future. I think the title refers to events in the past that resemble current events, or how our future should turn out. I know that sounds confusing. However, I can’t categorize the book…

This is a fun book, but I take exception with the first half of the title – this is not “how the internet happened,” which explains the qualifier “from Netscape to the iPhone.” This is really about 13 years in the history of the web, mainly. “The Internet” dates to the 50s or the 60s, but this is a…

I love Steven Johnson. “Where Good Ideas Come From” is one of my favorite books. This book looked back at 5-6 “inventions” that remarkably changed the modern world. I quote “inventions” because these things are really, really basic. So, things like “cold” , glass, recorded sound, etc. Johnson traces…

Amazingly wonderful book on the history of the digital age, all the way from Ada Lovelace and Charles Babbage through to Sergey Brin and Larry Page. Wonderfully written, always engrossing. It begins with a long discussion of Lovelace, Babbage, and Turing’s thoughts on whether a machine could ever be…

I didn’t finish this book. I got through 3-4 chapters, then skimmed the rest. I couldn’t figure out what it wanted to be. The author compared to to Howard Zinn’s book of similar name, but I couldn’t see it. The book seemed to be very specific vignettes about the early age of computing in the 60s….