Seconded. Cringely is the only one who doesn't make everything seem ooh-ahh-magical-brains! predetermined.
Altho that tell-all on the Segway (Code Name Ginger) was pretty cool for all the flaws it pointed out.
Where the Wizards Stay Up Late was a book I did an interactive presentation on in 7th grade, so it always has a special place in my heart. In retrospect, it's not fun to read, but at the time, I devoured it. It's boring and nothing really happens, which really is a good metaphor for the most exciting technical change.
Ooh, and "The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal." Especially if you're into UI and unsung heroes.
Not a novel, or a single book, but I love Richard Feynman's descriptions of Los Alamos. I can read his accounts of mental arithmetic battles with Bohr, safecracking, the programming of dozens of old-school human computers, all day long.
Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure by Jerry Kaplan. Recounts the true story of GO Corporation and the folks involved including John Doer and Bill Campbell. Been awhile since I picked this up but I remember it was a fun read.
"A Computer Called LEO" - story of the first commercial computer, used to run Lyons teashops. Fascinating both in terms of computer history, and history in general, especially Lyons' attitude to perfectionism, to the extent of doing many things themselves, that these days would never survive an outsourcing purge.
Drags a bit in places, but is still interesting in a history type way. It's the story of Data General building a 32-bit minicomputer in a year in the 1970s.
The various accounts weaved into The Jargon File. Gave me, early on in my programming life, a pretty good flavor of what being a hacker was really like.
How the Web Was Won: How Bill Gates and His Internet Idealists Transformed the Microsoft Empire
It portrays what I'd call "an idealized" version of events in that it's a fairly positive account of Microsoft's battle to beat Netscape. But it's a great story. What most people don't realize is there's a whole group of Softies inside Microsoft who were and still are fighting for the ideals that the Internet represents. The early days of IE and IIS represents a time when that group was allowed to shine and they produced great things.
It's actually very inspiring especially if you're a person whose found himself arguing for those same values in whatever company you work for.
In general, "Revolution in the Valley" about the making of the Macintosh. You cen feel the excitement of the team, and it goes into some fun technical details on how they created a GUI while everyone else outside research labs was still text-based.
For game programmers, "Masters of Doom" and "Dungeons and Dreamers". Both have a real human perspective on the people and companies they cover; they made me feel like regular humans, not gods, made games.
"One Jump Ahead: Computer Perfection at Checkers" - How Dr. Schaeffer's team came up with Chinook, the program that became world champion at checkers. Later the team went on to solve checkers (like tic tac toe is a "solved" game).
Some of the book is about researching new algorithms etc, but a large chunk is about programming, debugging etc. Very enjoyable read.
The Car That Could: The Inside Story of GM's Revolutionary Electric Vehicle by Michael Shnayerson.
If that gives you a taste for how crazy General Motors is, follow up with On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors by John Z. Delorian. Less about tech, more about management anti patterns!
I'm still reading "What the Dormouse Said: How 60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer", but I'm finding it quite good. Though I guess it's more about tech (counter)culture than tech itself.
To establish his credibility he lists both his "technology credentials" and his "counter culture credentials". If I had a time machine it would be nice to send him a copy of "Worse is Better". If he had read it maybe he wouldn't have failed at inventing the web.
"The New New Thing" by Michael Lewis is great: entertainingly written, and actually quite instructive about SV culture. "Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure" by Jerry Kaplan was also very good.
Does this book cover the business relationship that Tesla had with Westinghouse?
The impression that I got from Empires of Light is that Tesla's "research" needed a lot of "design" by Westinghouse's engineers before they could be turned into practical, working designs.
That makes sense at some level, but I'd love to read other perspectives.
The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal by M. Mitchell Waldrop. It's a very fun, easy, and interesting read of the origins of modern computing, the people who worked day and night to make their vision a reality, and the passion that carried their dreams to reality (the book, besides mentioning Joseph Carl Robnett Licklider, also names people from Grace Hopper to Steve Jobs and Bill Gates).
The Hot Zone by Richard Preston. It's not actually a "tech book" but it is a true story about the highly technical science of how a deadly virus spread.
Free as in Freedom, a story about Stallman. I liked the unusual story of rms driving a car and freaking out as he had to follow someone taking the "scenic route".
My least favorite was The Google Story - I couldn't stomach more than a chapter or two of it. It read like the sort of ass-kissing "He's a hero" crap that I encounter from living in an oil dictatorship.
Not quite a book, but I recently read and enjoyed the first essay from Tom Wolfe's Hooking Up - the essay is called "Two Young Men Who Went West" and is about Robert Noyce and William Shockley and the founding of Fairchild Semiconductor.
Tossing it out there because most people wouldn't buy that book looking for a true story tech book, but a little of it is.
The Official Book of Ultima. About how Richard Garriot started the Ultima series of computer role-playing games, and founded Origin Systems. Alas, it's sad when you consider the fate which befell both the game series and the company.
I can't recommend "High Stakes, No Prisoners: A Winner's Tale of Greed and Glory in the Internet Wars" by Charles Ferguson highly enough. He basically had the idea for the internet then, after Netscape launched just as he was creating a startup, morphed into making the first set of dev tools for the web -- Frontpage. Microsoft ended up buying them. He writes an utterly fascinating look at Microsoft, Gates, Netscape, Clarksdale, and the people who built the internet. He illustrates the strategies you use to build a platform and begs Netscape to follow them in the face of Microsoft "getting" the internet. In any case, it's well worth your time if you like startups; he also writes at length about the problems with non technical CEOs, etc.
