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Here are some of my favorite books about computer history, listed alphabetically. I probably forgot some! This list will evolve.

• Ada, the Enchantress of Numbers (Betty Toole)
• Before the computer : IBM, NCR, Burroughs, and Remington Rand and the industry they created, 1865-1956 (James Cortada)
• Calculating a Natural World: Scientists, Engineers, and Computers During the Rise of the U.S. Cold War Research (Atsushi Akera)
• The Cathedral & the Bazaar: Musings on Linux and Open Source by an Accidental Revolutionary (Eric Raymond)
• The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution (T.R. Reid)
• Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software (Charles Petzold
• Computer Lib / Dream Machines (Ted Nelson)
• Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age (Michael Hiltzik)
• Decoding the Heavens (Jo Marchant)
• The development of punch card tabulation in the Bureau of the Census, 1890-1940 (Leon Truesdell)
• The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution that Made Computing Personal (Mitchel Waldrop)
• ENIAC in Action: Making and Remaking the Modern Computer (Thomas Haigh, Mark Priestley, Crispin Rope)
• Edmund Berkeley and the Social Responsibility of Computer Professionals (Bernadette Longo)
• Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws Who Hacked Ma Bell (Phil Lapsley)
• Giant Brains, or Machines that Think (Edmund Berkeley)
• Glory and Failure: The Difference Engines of Johann Muller, Charles Babbage and Georg and Edvard Scheutz (Michael Lindgren)
• Grace Hopper and the Invention of the Information Age (Kurt Beyer)
• Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Steven Levy)
• Howard Aiken: Portrait of a Computer Pioneer (Bernard Cohen)
• Information and Secrecy: Vannevar Bush, Ultra, and the Other Memex (Colin Burke>
• iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It (Steve Wozniak)
• Jacquard's Web: How a Hand-Loom Led to the Birth of the Information Age (James Essinger)
• Just For Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary (Linus Torvalds)
• Konrad Zuse's Early Computers (Raúl Rojas)
• Modem World: A Prehistory of Social Media (Kevin Driscoll)
• Network Nation: Human Communication via Computer (Murray Turoff, Roxanne Hiltz)
• A New History of Modern Computing (Thomas Haigh, Paul Ceruzzi)
• The Origins of Digital Computers: Selected Papers (Brian Randell)
• Passages From the Life of a Philosopher (Charles Babbage)
• Revolution in Miniature: The history and impact of semiconductor electronics (Ernest Braun, Stuart Macdonald)
• The Universal History of Numbers: The Computer and the Information Revolution (Georges Ifrah)
• Unix: A History and a Memoir (Brian Kernighan)
• The Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the Nineteenth Century's Online Pioneers (Tom Standage)
• Weaving the Web: The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web (Tim Berners-Lee)
• What the Dormouse Said: How the Sixties Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry (John Markoff)
• When Computers Were Human (David Alan Grier)
• When Information Came of Age: Technologies of Knowledge in the Age of Reason and Revolution, 1700-1850 (Daniel Headrick)

Last updated by Evan Koblentz, Feb. 22, 2024 *** Contact: evank{at}njit.edu