(Part 2) Best computer history & culture books according to redditors
We found 103 Reddit comments discussing the best computer history & culture books. We ranked the 37 resulting products by number of redditors who mentioned them. Here are the products ranked 21-40. You can also go back to the previous section.
For more on this subject, I highly recommend this book:
The Chinese Typewriter: A History (The MIT Press) https://www.amazon.com/dp/0262036363/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_V3b9BbMN8PC7K
Story time! There are several specific robots that played a large role in getting me to learn how to build them, and into engineering in general. In a weird way, Stewbot is one of them.
I did not have cable growing up. I was instantly hooked, and tried to get my hands on anything I could, but my exposure to actually watching combat robotics when I was little during the original era was limited to once-in-a-blue-moon airings of Robot Wars reruns on PBS, dedicating hours of dial-up internet towards watching crappy quicktime clips of Battlebots, and listening in as all the kids at school who could watch discussed that week's fights intently. Oh, and spending every moment I could pouring over the official guidebook, which will become highly relevant in a moment.
I wanted so, so badly to build a robot -- I think in my mind, it was the only way I'd get to actually see an event properly, and learning tons of engineering somehow seemed more feasible than convincing my parents to spring for cable. My family didn't think too much of it when it was putting super-fast spinning gears on the front of my LEGO Mindstorms robots, or duct taping cardboard boxes with wedges to RC cars. But when I moved onto hacksawing apart old bicycles for parts, gutting an old computer and calling its case my frame, and asking for this thing called a "Vantec" for Christmas, they started to get understandably concerned that 11 year old personizzle was in way over their head, and expecting too much out of the whole thing. This manifested through a combination of reminders of how much education and experience all the engineers making the bots had, and just refusing to take the thing with any degree of seriousness...I was just a kid, playing with a computer case. And that got plenty discouraging, especially as I learned more about how little I knew, and how shitty a robot built from a scrap computer case/bike parts on zero budget by somebody with zero experience and zero power tools would inevitably be. As I got more involved in my first attempt at a full scale bot build, thumbing through that official guidebook made everything feel more and more out of reach.
Except there was this one page in there, which featured a collage of unnamed robots not featured elsewhere in the guide. In one corner, was Stewbot. Now, remember, I had never actually seen the show. I was completely unfamiliar with the strong sense of parody that came with Comedy Central's coverage -- all I knew was bits of Robot Wars, and in my 11 year old mind, combat robots was serious business! I had no idea that Stewbot was a tongue-and-cheek entry, built for the single purpose of getting destroyed in the most hilarious means imaginable. I thought it was just some guy's robot. When I'd get down about my own progress and comparisons to other bots, I'd find the Stewbot picture, and think "At least I can do better than that. RCX-combat robots were ages ago for me, I'm doing real metal stuff now!" And I'd continue working.
Thanks, Stewbot. Your utter shittyness made my efforts feel less shitty by comparison when I was going through this phase, and kept me going until I became kinda alright at engineering.
Documentary
Excellent Book
Be careful though, this thing engulfed my interest.
Hey, those are literally my specialties! (I'm a lawyer / registered patent attorney / former media law professor.)
If you're just getting into these areas, the In a Nutshell books are actually a pretty decent place to start.
http://www.amazon.com/Patent-Law-Nutshell-Martin-Adelman/dp/0314279997
http://www.amazon.com/Global-Internet-Nutshell-Michael-Rustad/dp/0314283307
Cyber/internet law is kind of a nebulous concept, because it's primarily regular law, applied to the internet. It's one of those things that non-lawyers like to argue about, because everyone has ideas about how things should work, and so there's a lot of popular media written for a lay audience. For thought leaders when it comes to internet law, I'd recommend Lawrence Lessig, Ryan Calo, Jonathan Zittrain, Jack Goldsmith and Tim Wu. There are also groups, like the EFF and the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, that have a lot of good resources.
Patent law is different -- it's incredibly complex, which is why it has its own additional exam that attorneys need to pass in order to prosecute patents (not to litigate them, though). Laypeople still have their own ideas about patent law, but generally those ideas boil down to "patent trolls are bad, mmmmkay?" Due to the complexity of the field, there's not much written for non-lawyers.
A lot of laypeople tend to conflate patent law with copyright law, and the fact that you didn't mention it here suggests that you may be doing the same. To quickly disambiguate them, patents prevent you from synthesizing a patented pharmaceutical, whereas copyrights prevent you from pirating movies.
Copyright law is pretty hotly contested amongst the laity, and more than a few lawyers think that the field needs a bit of reform. However, whereas non-lawyers tend to think that copyright law needs reform because of some misguided notion about how the internet makes sharing information easy, so we shouldn't have copyrights, the legal community tends to think copyright reform should focus on things like reducing the term of copyright protection to a more reasonable number of decades.
When you look for thought leaders about copyright, despite it being a pretty popular topic on the internet, you're not going to find as much (although, you'll see a lot of the same people who talk about internet law also writing about copyright). The reason for this is that the whole internet piracy/copyright debate basically went nowhere way back in the late 90s/early 2000s, and it's reached a pretty stable, logical place in the law. There are pro-piracy websites written by non-lawyers (e.g., Torrent Freak) that are kind of the holocaust-deniers of copyright law (and thus get the appropriate adoration from like-minded folks), but I'm having a hard time coming up with many academic writers of note that supports that position. Charles Nesson (who actually founded the Berkman Center, if I'm remembering right) could probably be called sympathetic, but I'm not very familiar with his work.
If you haven't read it already, you might want to check out David Kahn's The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication from Ancient Times to the Internet.
He's not joking when he says it's comprehensive: it's 1200 pages. Absolutely fascinating if you're at all into the history of crypto; it goes into a lot of detail about not only how historical cryptosystems worked, what were their weaknesses and how they were cryptanalyzed etc., but also the historical context in which the systems were used and developed.
Edit: Just realized the Colossus book I was thinking of was this. I'll have to check out the one you linked to
Here are a series of books used by law students when taking those courses. The Example and Explanations and hornbooks series are a go to in law school (I used them in most classes). A lot of law school focuses on casebooks, but these cover the principles and nuts and bolts of the subjects.
https://www.amazon.com/Examples-Explanations-Corporations-Alan-Palmiter/dp/1454850167/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1502458522&sr=8-5&keywords=corporate+law
https://www.amazon.com/Business-Organizations-Law-Hornbooks-James/dp/1634592271/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1502458463&sr=8-2&keywords=business+law+hornbook
https://www.amazon.com/Examples-Explanations-Contracts-Brian-Blum/dp/1454868414/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1502458487&sr=8-1&keywords=contracts+examples+and+explanations
https://www.amazon.com/Examples-Explanations-Intellectual-Stephen-McJohn/dp/1454850159/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502458793&sr=1-1&keywords=intellectual+property+examples+and+explanations
Casebooks:
https://www.amazon.com/Cyberlaw-Problems-Jurisprudence-Information-American/dp/0314917535/ref=sr_1_12?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1502458711&sr=1-12&keywords=cyber+law
What a coincidence.... the day you posted that photo i was reading your book :-). It was a great read, btw, i love reading such "diary/autobiography-like" books (i also read A Microsoft Life yesterday by Stephen Toulouse).
So jealous! My computer law text is not nearly as fun...
Before people settled on "computers" as the word to use in English, they also used "electronic brains" as well. The formal Chinese term for computers is still 電子計算機, or "electronic computer", but since 計算機 has become the term for "calculators", this has become uncommon and sounds stilted now.
You know, though, there's a good reason that politics is the first arena where this phenomenon being applicable comes to mind.
I love how the internet allows for niche communities to flourish, but when combined with the group polarization phenomenon and compounded by the fragmentation of any common national conversation/event/discourse/information source/etc, then the implications for the public space are really scary.
Highly, highly recommend Cass Sunstein's "Republic.com" (http://www.amazon.com/Republic-com-2-0-Cass-R-Sunstein/dp/0691143285) for a really fascinating take on this topic. Think it explains more about contemporary politics than almost any other book I've read in the past decade.
That was a funny solution a Cracked writer proposed to the whole debate, to free multiplayer games from singleplayer games so they can quit hassling each other. It solves some problems, creates others.
Technically my reading list moved away from game academia a while ago. I'm just a hobby writer, I don't worry about the same issues they do. I was a game critic for 3 years at Popmatters while I was in law school and I steadily got more interested in rule theory. That's most of what I do now in my writing.
I don't really know where someone could start with that...probably by studying systems. This is an outstanding intro book for it. Something bit more sophisticated on rule systems would be this one on how they are presented
I can start rattling off the legal philosophers but they are such boring old farts...Greg Lastowka wrote what is probably the best book on game design and law.
This was an excellent book on almost that exact subject way back in the day. It's more than a little dated now, but still a good read.
Looking for this book
https://www.amazon.com/Information-Technology-Law-Society/dp/0198732465
Andrew Murray
Information Technology Law: The Law and Society
3rd Edition
ISBN-13: 978-0198732464
$10
I highly recommend 'The Dream Machine' which is the book my parents bought for me in the 90's for the same reason; and I went on to study Comp Sci and a career in Software Development! Still remember how inspiring I found this book's stories; it covers the companies and people involved in key computing developments, as well as early approaches to robotics. The many photographs and illustrations keep it engaging.
It is likely that the model for the movements of the celestial bodies predated Ptolemy, because he and many others have written about the "Antikythera" mechanism.
I recommend Jo Marchant's book "Decoding the heavens" on this subject.
Well, if you're interested in the subject, I'll also recommend Helen Nissenbaum's Privacy In Context. I'm actually doing research with her for the year, related to her theory of contextual integrity. IMO, contextual integrity is the best theoretical description out there of what we really mean when we say we have a "right to privacy." The book just came out a couple years ago, and we're working on how to apply it in a legal context.
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