Turing's Cathedral

Turing's cathedral, on the invention and development of the earliest digital computers just before, during, and after WWII. Lots of excellent detail, descriptions of the personalities and relationships of many interesting people, like von Neumann.

MANIAC & Turing's Cathedral

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

In no order in particular, these are good books: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/722412.The_Dream_Machine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Compute... (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackers:_Heroes_of_the_Computer_Revolution) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12625589-turing-s-cathed... (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/12625589-turing-s-cathedral) https://openlibrary.org/books/OL27198205M/Fire_in_the_valley

some that I read and recommend: - Turing's cathedral - Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution - masters of doom (game dev history more than cs)

Turing's Cathedral is fantastic. The most enjoyable computer science history book I've read. Highly recommended.

+1 for Turing's Cathedral. As mentioned, it's a lot about von Neumann. Slightly dense writing style but does a great job of explaining some of the key intellectual breakthroughs behind development of the computer. It's most about the 1940s-50s but it sets the historical context well (both contemporary and going back to Gottfried Leibnitz).

Haven't read them, but they are on my to-do-list: "Turing's Cathedral" https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/25/turings-cathed... (https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/mar/25/turings-cathedral-george-dyson-review) "The Innovators" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Innovators_%28book%29

Most of mine are going to be books by philosophers or scientists (about philosophy or other things). - The Conquest of Happiness by Bertrand Russell was a pretty good one. He has a lot of ideas that were ahead of their time (positive psychology, etc). You can see a lot of parallels between his ideas and modern Stoicism (although Russell criticized it elsewhere, I think he came to some of the same conclusions). - Introduction To Mathematical Philosophy by Bertrand Russell. Another Russell one. I think this is probably the clearest and easiest to understand explanation I've ever read of the underpinnings of mathematical foundations. It's written in a style that should be accessible to almost anyone with a high school education. He wrote it while he was in prison (for refusing to be drafted) during WW1. Apparently he left a copy of it to the prison warden. - An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume. This is worth reading because it is the motivation for basically all of modern philosophy of science (at least in the west). It's also pretty easy to read and if you read it you'll be able to more easily understand other books and papers that are responses to it.…

The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood. An easily digestible summary of information and key figures in its history. Turing's Cathedral (or as my brothers call it: Von Neumann's Cathedral). An awesome account of the history of computation, and the obstacles that had to be overcome. Cryptonomicon. Hilarious The Strangest Man, by Graham Farmelo. A biography of delightfully awkward Paul Dirac. The Library of Babel, by Jorge Luis Borges. Thought provoking and profound.