The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal
All
Hacker News 8
This Year
Hacker News 2
This Month
Hacker News 1
https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Co...
This one tells the story from the precursors to time-sharing to PARC, using the figure of J.C.R. Licklider as a pivot, and was recommended by Alan Kay as better than Dealers of Lightning. I personally enjoyed both.
IIRC a colleague of von Neumann circulated a technical report by him, where he was summarizing the work of others along with his own, with regard to the stored program architecture. But his name was the only one on it, and the inventors of other machines got pissed off.
There was a rush to patent the idea, and patent litigation. But the idea was never patented, I think because of prior art.
It's interesting to think about what would happen if the idea was patented... I mean it is a significant idea and probably deserves a patent under the law. But would that have set computing history back by a decade or two?
The Dream Machine also goes into some other "inside baseball"... e.g. the relationship between Turing and Church, etc.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Co...
It's an awesome book about the history of computing, human-computer interaction, and all sorts of things you're familiar with but may never have known where they came from or how they evolved.
http://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Com...
https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-Licklider-Revolution-Co...
I have heard Patrick collision talking about this book quite a few times.