Today I thought I write down some thoughts on a book I noticed when I was at the Living Computer Museum and Labs (LCM+L) in Seattle last year: ‘Atypical Geek Girl’ by Katherine Hitchcock. In her memoirs, Katherine describe her 30 year tech career in IBM that began in the 1960s.
And jumping right from the last science fiction book review to the next one. I could have gone for the sequel of ‘The Sleeping Giants’ but decided to do that later and go for something else first. My choice fell on “We Are Legion, We Are Bob” by Dennis E. Taylor.
After having read a couple of classics lately, I decided to go for some contemporary science fiction for a change. For me that’s a rather difficult domain because most science fiction these days seems to by dystopian which I don’t really enjoy at all. So I select my science fiction carefully. One book I recently … Continue reading Book Review – Sleeping Giants
Back in the mid 1980’s I’ve visited my uncle at the ETH Zürich and I still remember what he showed to me that day: A Cray-1 supercomputer. There I was, a teenager with a Commodore 64 at home standing right next to one of the fastest computers on earth at the time. The very fact … Continue reading Book Review: The Supermen – The Story of Seymour Cray
I like to read literary classics every now and then but recently, I’ve been somewhat hindered by Project Gutenberg completely blocking German visitors after a German court has ruled that they must not make certain works available in Germany. Shame on the S. Fisher publishing house and I will certainly never buy anything from them … Continue reading Book Review: The Time Machine
When I was at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge for the first time back in December 2017 I noticed a small exhibition about the LEO, the first business computer built in the early 1950s by the Lyons tea company. By a tea company!?
Back in 1994, a book was published that I read at the time and up to this day, I am not sure how serious the people who wrote it were about it. Its title: ‘The Unix Haters Handbook‘. Having been in my bookshelf for the better part of the last 20 years, I recently stumbled … Continue reading Book Review – The Unix Haters Handbook
Back on the history track again, I picked up an electronic copy of Leslie Berlin’s ‘Troublemakers – Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age’ about the early days of Silicon Valley. I’ve read quite a number of books about the rise of Silicon valley in the past, some on famous people like Steve Jobs but most on … Continue reading Book Review – Troublemakers
A book that’s been on my reading list for quite some time was ‘Flatland’ by Edwin A. Abbott. Published in 1884, it’s available as ePub on Project Gutenberg, unless you live in Germany and don’t have a VPN to get around them blocking their library for Germany. I got interested in Flatland because I heard … Continue reading Book Review – Flatland – “Upward, not Northward”
After reading ‘Ready Player One’, a science fiction novel written not long ago, playing in the near future I thought I’d pick up something entirely different and have a look at a classic science fiction crime story, Isaac Asimov’s ‘The Caves of Steel’. Written in the 1950s and playing in the distant future, the contrast … Continue reading Book Review – Isaac Asimov – The Caves of Steel