From today’s perspective, one of the most important courses during my computer science education in college was the one that taught me about how operating systems work. And while many things that I learned at college are no longer relevant, the material of that course is still as relevant today as it was then. Sure, … Continue reading Book Review: Linux Kernel Programming – Kaiwan N Billimoria
In 1999, Tim Berners-Lee, together with Mark Fischetti, wrote ‘Weaving the Web‘, a book on how he invented the World Wide Web in the late 1980s and the early 1990’s. It is still published today so it’s not difficult to get hold of it. You can also lend a copy in PDF format from OpenLibrary.org. … Continue reading Book Review – Weaving the Web
For a long long time I wanted to find out a bit more about the history of Digital Equipment Corporation and its legendary co-founder Ken Olson. I’ve never worked on a DEC machine in my career, but many of their machines are famous, e.g. the PDP-1 and space war, the PDP-8 as the first ‘affordable’ … Continue reading Book Review: The Ultimate Entrepreneur – Ken Olson and DEC
It’s been six months since my last book review on computing history and there are a number of reasons for it. Back in June I started reading ‘The Dream Machine’ by M. Mitchell Waldrop, a computing history book focusing on the life of J. C. R. Licklider. The 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon … Continue reading Book Review – The Dream Machine
There’s quite a bit of a gap between this and the previous book review mainly due to the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 in July that has kept me busy with re-reading a number of books I’ve had for many years and spending many hours with ApolloInRealtime. Anyway, the book review today, is a follow-up … Continue reading Book Review – First Man
When I finished the second book of the Bobiverse trilogy by Dennis E. Taylor, I immediately jumped into ‘All These Worlds‘, the third and (so far) final part of this brilliant science fiction series. Short summary of what happened so far without too many spoilers: Geek brain gets frozen today, wakes up as replicant a … Continue reading Book Review: All These Worlds
Further and further back I go to find out why things in computing today are the way they are. The latest book I have read on computing history is actually a bit away from computing and is about the development about the transistor, microchips and finally, microprocessors. One person that significantly stands out in this … Continue reading Book Review: The Man Behind The Microchip
A couple of weeks ago I got away very impressed and entertained by ‘We are Bob‘, a crazy story about a programming whiz kid that gets run over by a car and waking up a hundred years into the future, not in his own body, but as a replicant in a sophisticated computer. He’s then … Continue reading Book Review: For We Are Many
I usually don’t write about books of which I did not quite enjoy and thus I would not have written about ‘Only Human‘ by Sylvain Neuvel if I had not written about the two earlier books of the trilogy ‘Sleeping Giants‘ and ‘Waking Gods‘ before. I already noted in the first blog entry on the … Continue reading Book Review: Only Human
A couple of weeks ago I read the first book of the ‘Themis Files’ trilogy by Sylvain Neuvel and was blown away by the original story. In some cases I find that sequels to an original story might not be bad but have a hard time reaching the same level of storytelling and content of … Continue reading Book Review: Waking Gods