A History of Modern Computing
by Paul E Ceruzzi
Finished on
This is the first edition, written in the mid-1990s, so stops amid the personal computer era. There’s a second edition published in 2003, and Ceruzzi has written a concise history for MIT Press which is far, far shorter and should be considered entirely separately.
It’s one for the enthusiast, I’ll grant you, but I very much enjoyed this book. I was mostly interested in learning about early electronic computers, and here we start really with Eckert and Mauchly and the UNIVAC, through IBM, DEC and so on. Ceruzzi does a good job of explaining both the technical and business-military aspects of the computer industry’s development.
It’s very well written, and I’d recommend it to those interested in how we got from ENIAC and Colossus to here.