books

Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander; iUniverse, 1999, .

Ask consumers and users what names they associate with the multibillion dollar personal computer market, and they will answer IBM, Apple, Tandy, or Lotus. The more knowledgable of them will add the likes of Microsoft, Ashton-Tate, Compaq, and Borland. But no one will say Xerox. Fifteen years after it invented personal computing, Xerox still means "copy".

Fumbling the Future tells how one of America's leading corporations invented the technology for one of the fastest-growing products of recent times, then miscalculated and mishandled the opportunity to fully exploit it. It is a classic story of how innovation can fare within large corporate structures, the real-life odyssey of what can happen to an idea as it travels from inspiration to implementation.

More than anything, Fumbling the Future is a tale of human beings whose talents, hopes, fears, habits, and prejudices determine the fate of our largest organizations and of our best ideas. In an era in which technological creativity and economic change are so critical to the competitiveness of the American economy, Fumbling the Future is a parable for our times.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: XEROX PARC.

Douglas Hofstadter. Copyright © 1979. Basic Books. .

This book reads like an intellectual Grand Tour of hacker preoccupations. Music, mathematical logic, programming, speculations on the nature of intelligence, biology, and Zen are woven into a brilliant tapestry themed on the concept of encoded self-reference. The perfect left-brain companion to Illuminatus.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Bibliography.

Steven Levy. Anchor/Doubleday. Copyright © 1984. .

Levy's book is at its best in describing the early MIT hackers at the Model Railroad Club and the early days of the microcomputer revolution. He never understood Unix or the networksthough, and his enshrinement of Richard Stallman as “the last true hacker” turns out (thankfully) to have been quite misleading. Despite being a bit dated and containing some minor errors (many fixed in the paperback edition), this remains a useful and stimulating book that captures the feel of several important hacker subcultures.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Bibliography.

John E. Hopcroft; Addison-Wesley Series in Computer Science, 1979 0-201-02988-X.

From the Back Cover -- Computational complexity as a coherent theory. It includes end-of-chapter questions, bibliographies, and exercises. Problems of highest and intermediate difficulty are marked respectively with double or single stars.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Cinderella Book.

Don Libes. Sandy Ressler. Prentice-Hall. Copyright © 1989. 0-13-536657-7.

The authors of this book set out to tell you all the things about Unix that tutorials and technical books won't. The result is gossipy, funny, opinionated, downright weird in spots, and invaluable. Along the way they expose you to enough of Unix's history, folklore and humor to qualify as a first-class source for these things. Because so much of today's hackerdom is involved with Unix, this in turn illuminates many of its in-jokes and preoccupations.

This book has been mentioned in the following pages of the Jargon File: Bibliography.