Singh Simon - Code book is an excellent and fantastic read about the history of cryptography and provide insights of what really drove technical improvements in ww1 and 2.
I second this. It's a wonderful read. I particularly enjoyed learning the history of various unix commands, for example, I was unfamiliar with the grep family of commands until the book explained it clearly. It also gives in more detail the tale of Ken Thompsan reverse engineering a printer firmware, CPU, and assembly language, and rewriting the entire firmware to be 1000x better, in about an hour.
Fire in the Valley - The making of the Personal Computer by Paul Freiberger & Michael Swaine, published by McGraw Hill, 2000 463 pages. Excellent reference telling many of the P.C stories.
A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi
There is a completely rewritten version of this with an additional author:
A New History of Modern Computing by Thomas Haigh and Paul Ceruzzi
Also:
Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray
There are good books by journalists and popular writers. Favorites on HN are:
The Dream Machine -- you are already reading this. Also:
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet by Katie Hafner and Matthey Lyon
These and many many other books are recomended and described in this HN thread from a few years ago:
Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281
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