Reddit reviews Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
We found 17 Reddit comments about Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
I LOVE following the history of networking, awesome find!
If you end up wanting more, where wizards stay up late and dealers of lightning are great reads about the people behind the early internet.
I've read a number of books about the subject so I'm summing up what I've read; but I'd recommend in particular the books Dealers Of Lightning, Fumbling The Future and Apple Confidential if you're interested to read more. Here's also an interesting article from the New Yorker about it.
It's called Dealers of Lightning by Michael Hiltzik. (Amazon) It was a good read, I would recommend it.
The interesting thing is that Steve Jobs saw such promise at Xerox PARC that he offered to let Xerox buy Apple out before the stock went public, just so that he could have access to the technology and engineers at PARC.
I cannot emphasize enough how good Dealers of Lightning is, but if you're interested in technology, it's a really great read.
read this book then. It is probably going to be interesting for you
http://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/dp/0887309895/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1322594175&sr=8-1
...Dealers of Lightning is a fascinating journey of intellectual creation. In the 1970s and '80s, Xerox Corporation brought together a brain-trust of engineering geniuses, a group of computer eccentrics dubbed PARC. This brilliant group created several monumental innovations that triggered a technological revolution, including the first personal computer, the laser printer, and the graphical interface (one of the main precursors of the Internet), only to see these breakthroughs rejected by the corporation. Yet, instead of giving up, these determined inventors turned their ideas into empires that radically altered contemporary life and changed the world.
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Tip of the hat to the pioneers... Lawrence Roberts, Vin Cerf, Bob Taylor, Ivan Sutherland, Douglas Engelbart and J.C.R. Licklider, among many others. Well worth studying up on these dudes. Some excellent reads (available at your public library, natch): "Dealers of Lightning" an excellent book about Xerox PARC; "Where Wizards Stay Up Late" fascinating book about MIT and DARPA; J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal a turgid yet compelling book about J.C.R. Licklider and his contemporaries.
For a while there I'd use the Wikipedia Book Creator to aggregate a bunch of articles on a certain topic and then download it to my eInk e-Reader to peruse in bed until I fell asleep.
One such topic was early computing up through the Microcomputing era and the 1977 Trinity.
At that point of history I was reading Empires of Light about the AC/DC war, Where Wizards Stay Up Late about the birth of ARPANET, Dealers of Lightning, about PARC, Commodore: A Company on the Edge (about the rise of Commodore through the PET, slaying TI, and faltering after the C64), and Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, which was enlightening, even though it was written for someone who couldn't tell a modem from a hub.
if you read this book you'll see even more similar stories. Xerox hated Xerox Parc.
Or you can check out this book which will explain so much more of where Xerox was, what they had and how they lost it all
http://www.amazon.com/Dealers-Lightning-Xerox-PARC-Computer/dp/0887309895/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1269090250&sr=8-1
Dealers of Lightning A very eye-opening look at how Xerox invented... well, pretty much everything about modern computing. Laser printers, ethernet, GUIs, video output (instead of character output) all of it came out of an amazingly open R&D environment in one lab.
If you just want a good read, I recommend Dealers of Lightning. It does a great job covering Xerox PARC's influence on computing through its history.
Xerox PARC was amazing, get yourself a copy of Dealers of Lightning if you haven't already read it.
These might be the kind of thing you are looking for. I have read all, and liked them:
A great book on some of the actual history of this is Dealers of Lightning
https://www.amazon.com/dp/0887309895
one i enjoyed was computing in the middle ages by Severo Ornstein. all sorts of fun stories in the early days of computing and scheduling. i found it a lot more enjoyable than turing's cathedral (i have a dislike of dyson's writing).
another one is dealers of lightning about the Xerox PARC days of creating the GUI, mouse, etc. also looks at how PARC failed to commercialize it due to fights within xerox.
Think you mean "Triumph of the Nerds" which is the documentary based on the book Accidental Empires, How the Boys of Silicon Valley Make Their Millions, Battle Foreign Competition, and Still Can't Get a Date written by Robert Cringely. A good read, IMO. (Revenge of the Nerds was a movie with Lewis, Gilbert and Booger!)
Also worth a read are: Dealers of Lightning, Xerox parc and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael Hiltzik; Go To by Steve Lohr; and Hard Drive, Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire by Wallace & Erickson
If anyone would like to know more about the history of Parc, I'd recommend they pick up this book