computing_history

Chip War

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I think it was Hugh who recommended this book. I'm greatful as it was an excellent read and definitely didn't make me duck over to eBay to buy an Intel 4004 chip set to play with. The book uses the backdrop of our current struggles to retain supremacy in high tech manufacturing versus an ambitious China to tell the story of the semiconductor industry in general. It's a global story of massive proportion, with a huge amount of the global economy now dependent on a product which didn't exist 75 years ago. The story starts just after world war two, with Fairchild Semiconductor and Texas Instruments battling it out to produce integrated circuits from newfangled transistors for the Apollo and Minuteman 2 programs. Importantly, Silicon Valley saw consumer market adoption of semiconductors and cheap efficient Asian manufacturing as key to driving down prices and increasing yield rates. At the same time the Pentagon saw integrated circuits as key to maintaining a technological advantage over their Cold War rivals -- the Soviet Bloc was winning in terms of quantity of armament, so the plan was to win with quality of armament. Effectively, the Pentagon sought to bankrupt the Russians by making…

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Cult of the Dead Cow

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A very readable history of the early US hacking scene, including the roots of Def Con and Blackhat security conferences. The book is filled with a cast of characters many of whose names and exploits I recognize -- although I've only met one or two in person. The book is definitely US-centric in it's coverage but an interesting way to spend a summer evening or two. Menn (the author) spends a lot of time working through the moral reasoning that led a group formed out of an interest in how things worked and a sense of community among the socially awkward, to a group that made a profound difference to how we think about responsible disclosure of security vulnerabilities and our obligations as technologists while at the same time trying to be funny (the hackers, not the author). The description of how cDc dragged Microsoft kicking and screaming into taking security for their software seriously is both funny and interesting, as well as the discussion of early attempts at responsible disclosure at a time where software vendors would sue instead of fixing their products. I find the descriptions of the various players "going straight" and acquiring actual jobs in order…

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Unix: a history and a memoir

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It was a bit surprising to me that Brian Kernighan self-published a book about Unix history with Kindle Direct publishing, but given how many other books he's published he must have his reasons for not using traditional channels for this one. The book is an engaging read, with quotes which still seem timely today popping up every so often. Certainly the decision to self-publish does not appear to have been because of a lack of effort put into the book. An example of a quote I think is still relevant today: "Stable funding was a crucial factor for research. It meant that AT&T could take a long-term view and Bell Labs researchers had the freedom to explore areas that might not have a near-term payoff and perhaps never would. That's a contrast with today's world, in which planning often seems to look ahead only a few months, and much effort is spent on speculating on financial results for the next quarter." (page 7). Kernighan covers his own early career and the general functioning of Bell Labs, before starting to delve into the history of Unix. Describing at a high level early batch processing systems and then Multics, Kernighan describes how…

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The Mythical Man-Month

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I expect everyone (well, almost everyone) involved in some way in software engineering has heard of this book. I decided that it was time to finally read it, largely prompted by this excellent blog post by apenwarr which discusses second systems effect among other things. Now, you can buy this book for a surprisingly large amount of money, but as Michael Carden pointed out, the PDF is also made available for free by the Internet Archive. I’d recommend going that route.

The book is composed of a series of essays, which discuss the trials of the OS/360 team in the mid-1960s, and uses those experiences to attempt to form a series of more general observations on the art of software development and systems engineering.

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The Mythical Man-month Book Cover The Mythical Man-month
Frederick Phillips Brooks, Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.,
Computer programming
Reading, Mass. ; Don Mills, Ont. : Addison-Wesley Publishing Company
1975
195

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