Technology and Computing

The building of the Panama Canal, from France's failed attempt to US completion.

A Data General team races to design a 32-bit minicomputer in about a year.

Electrification in the US, Britain and Germany, 1880 to 1930, as a technical system.

Why complex, tightly coupled systems such as Three Mile Island will fail regardless.

MIT's introductory computer science text, taught through Lisp and Scheme.

How the bomb was built, from the discovery of atomic energy to Hiroshima.

Why well-run firms lose to cheaper, worse products that enter at the market's bottom.

Economics for information goods: pricing, versioning, lock-in and network effects.

How Xerox PARC built the first personal computer and laser printer, and lost them.

Essays on open-source software and its model of collaborative development.

How John Carmack and John Romero made Doom and Quake and changed video games.

How inventions of 1867 to 1914, from electricity to cars, made the modern world.

How the diesel engine and the gas turbine made modern global trade possible.

How American manufacturing rose to lead the world, and why its share then fell.

How much steel, cement and plastic the world uses, and whether growth needs less.

How Bitcoin works underneath: keys, addresses, transactions, mining and the network.

The rise of Bitcoin and the people trying to build a new money for the internet.

How multi-sided platforms such as card networks get both sides on board at once.

How platforms create value by matching groups, unlike linear pipeline businesses.

SpaceX's first six years, when it nearly failed four times before Falcon 1 flew.

Control and communication in animals and machines run on the same principles.

Why structures hold up or fail: tension, compression, shear and fracture explained.

Three generations of hackers, from MIT's AI Lab to the Homebrew club and game makers.

How Kilby and Noyce each invented the integrated circuit in 1958 and 1959.

How Xerox invented the personal computer and then ignored it.

How the Macintosh was made and launched in 1984.

How machines and economies grow so complex that they behave like living systems.

Inside Microsoft's Windows NT team from 1988 to its 1993 release.

How Licklider and Pentagon-funded engineers built the network behind the internet.

How the Bell Labs team of Shockley, Bardeen and Brattain invented the transistor.

How to invest in tech stocks by backing the gorilla that wins each market.

A theory of modularity in design, applied to the history of the computer industry.

Treat patents as financial and strategic assets, not legal defences.

Jim Clark, founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape, starts a third company in 1999.

Run a tech company for shareholder value by funding its core advantage.

How Linux came to be developed, and how its creator thinks.

The reporting history of Linux and the businesses built around it.

J.C.R. Licklider's vision of computers that serve individuals, and how it came true.

The internet stock bubble from Netscape's 1995 listing to the crash.

How Intel and others became and stayed leaders of technology platforms.

How 1980s changes turned the US patent system from aid to obstacle for innovation.

Political economy of production without conventional property.

Robert Noyce, Fairchild Semiconductor and the founding of Intel.

The search industry from early engines to Google, and how paid search was invented.

Software platforms as two-sided markets, and how they price and grow.

Without shelf limits, sales of many niche products add up to rival the hits.

How Israel, Taiwan and Ireland each used the state to build IT industries.

Computing is becoming a utility supplied over a network, as electricity did.

Digital costs near zero mean goods can be given away, which changes whole industries.

How Google disrupted newspapers, books, television and advertising.

Facebook from its Harvard origin to 2010, with wide access to Zuckerberg.

Every US information industry moved from an open era to control by one firm.

How humanity and technology together keep widening the opportunities open to people.

A Microsoft co-founder's memoir of his ventures, successes and failures.

Google's technical and business decisions from Stanford research to 2011.

Steve Jobs's life and Apple's products, from forty interviews with him and many more.

Work is splitting between those who work well with smart machines and the rest.

How government decisions and monopolies left US internet access slow and costly.

A catalogue reviewing over 1,500 tools and what each one is good for.

How 3D printing and other tools let anyone start a manufacturing business.

How Edison's electric light changed American life and marked a new age.

A forecast of a hugely connected future world, with its challenges and benefits.

A novel in which an IT manager rescues a failing project using lessons from The Goal.

How Google hired and managed smart creatives, people who can't be told what to do.

Computing as a run of collaborations, from Ada Lovelace and Babbage to Google.

Intel's history through Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore and Andy Grove.

How the mp3, a CD-factory leaker and pirate websites broke the music business.

How BlackBerry maker Research In Motion rose to dominance and fell after the iPhone.

Marissa Mayer's arrival at Yahoo in 2012 and her struggle to turn it around.

Wall Street Journal reporters on money, trust and the blockchain claim.

The five schools of machine learning, and the search for one algorithm to unite them.

From a Dayton bicycle shop to the first powered flights and the 1908 demonstrations.

The technology trends that will reshape daily life over the next thirty years.

The life of Claude Shannon, whose information theory underlies the digital age.

How games such as Uncharted 4, Halo Wars and Destiny were made, and the strain.

Why the platform mattered politically, and what that cost it.

Why China may match the US in AI now that applying it matters more than research.

Subtitled Exploring the Rise and Fall of Nokia in Mobile Phones.

Sound money must hold value over time, and Bitcoin's fixed supply makes it such.

The hidden on-demand workers who make automated online services work.

The 1986 Chernobyl disaster, and the secrecy and myth that hid what happened.

Innovation platforms and transaction platforms, and what each needs to succeed.

Facebook from its founding to 2019, from hundreds of interviews including Zuckerberg.

A trader in his parents' London house, and his link to the 2010 flash crash.

The Instagram story, its sale to Facebook and what Zuckerberg did to its founders.

Samsung Electronics and the Lee family that controls it, from inside.

The struggle to make machine learning systems do what people actually intend.

Why the US buys military power wrongly, and the case for cheap autonomous systems.

How open-source software is really made and maintained, often by a few people.

How Facebook mishandled data and spread fake news and hate, and its inner politics.

One USB charger followed from a factory in Vietnam by ship and truck to a door.

The two 737 MAX crashes and the corporate history at Boeing that led to them.

How Hinton, LeCun and Bengio kept neural networks alive until deep learning took off.

Tesla from its founding disputes through the Model 3 production crisis to 2020.

How to launch a network product that is worthless until enough people use it.

Apple after Steve Jobs, told through Tim Cook's operations and Jony Ive's design.

How chips became the key to economic and military power, made in a few chokepoints.

Two years inside the 2021 crypto boom and 2022 bust, starting from Tether.

Why AI and synthetic biology will spread fast and cheaply, and how to contain them.

How trade and payment chokepoints became instruments of state coercion.

Four companies, from Planet Labs to Rocket Lab, racing to build cheap satellites.

A biography of Bill Gates covering his reinvention after Microsoft.

How Elon Musk's takeover wrecked Twitter.

Nvidia from its 1993 founding to the AI boom, from interviews with Jensen Huang.

SpaceX from 2008 through Falcon 9, the Dragon capsule and reusable boosters.

How Apple built its manufacturing base in China, and what it gave China in return.

A former Facebook policy director's memoir of the company from 2011 to 2017.

A reported history of OpenAI and the industry it created.

Sam Altman's life, including his November 2023 firing and return at OpenAI.

Alex Karp and Palantir's path from CIA funding to the surveillance state.

Insider manifesto by Palantir's CEO on tech and national power.

How the stirrup and the plough reorganised medieval society and economy

Insider history of liquid rocket propellant development

The founding of AI research, from interviews with McCarthy, Minsky and others.

Classic on the bet-the-company economics of airliner programs.

The idea of personal computing and the people who pursued it, up to PARC.

Portraits of the scientists, engineers and founders behind new technology.

How electricity spread through everyday American life and commerce.

Nucor building a mini-mill at the bottom of the steel cycle.

AI research from Dartmouth in 1956 to the funding cuts, told by the field's leaders.

How IBM lost control of the PC industry to Microsoft, Intel and the clone makers.

IBM's technical and organisational history up to the System/360 computers.

Commercial aviation from biplanes after the First World War to deregulation.

Contemporary profiles including Yahoo's founding by Yang and Filo.

Sequel to Hard Drive, on the browser wars and the road to antitrust.

Unauthorised; Ellison tried to block it.

1997 forecast of digital money weakening the nation state

Seymour Cray and the supercomputer business he built and lost

Written before the crash, naming Yahoo among the overvalued.

Early and prescient case that access would displace ownership.

Microsoft's internal fights over the internet and over the antitrust case.

The argument that Taiwan's chip industry protects it from Chinese attack.

Video games from their pre-electronic origins to the industry of 2001.

Richard Stallman, the free software movement and the GPL licence he wrote.

How the TRIPS treaty spread patent and copyright rents worldwide, drugs included.

Nokia's history, written with access to its boardroom records.

eBay: the cleanest early case of a pure marketplace take rate.

The telecom capex bubble, with Ebbers and WorldCom at its centre.

How the AOL Time Warner merger, the largest in US history, fell apart.

The AOL side of the AOL Time Warner merger, reported as it collapsed.

Chester Carlson and xerography, the invention that funded PARC.

Subtitled 'Big Ideas from the Computer Age'; collects early essays

How Lucent went from industry leader to junk credit rating in two years.

Payments economics: interchange, closed loops and why Amex's model differs.

How to run an open source project, its community and its sponsors.

Shockley and the accidental seeding of Silicon Valley.

The duopoly rivalry and the 787 and A380 bets.

Evidence that patents work poorly as property; the IP-as-asset skeptic case.

Strategy comparison explaining how Samsung overtook Sony.

How Microsoft turned patents from lawsuits into a licensing business.

How the chip industry moved to contract manufacturing, and what changed with it.

Dramatised founding story; source for The Social Network.

Environmentalist case for nuclear power, dense cities and genetic engineering

Execution algorithms and direct market access, from the desk.

Video games from Atari and cartridge consoles to Nintendo and the global industry.

How utility business models must change once regulated growth ends.

The maths of pay-per-use versus owned capacity.

How electronic trading and off-exchange venues took over.

Inside Y Combinator in the years before Altman ran it.

The arithmetic of conversion rates, whales and lifetime value.

The pay-TV smartcard hacking operation; the strangest corner of the empire.

Why US railroads declined under regulation and recovered after the Staggers Act.

The engineering and capital replacement cycle of urban water systems.

Water technology as an export industry built from a domestic constraint.

The life of Intel founder Gordon Moore and the forecast named after him.

Designing the interaction that a platform is actually built around.

How minor metals are mined, traded and hoarded.

The global race to build a better lithium-ion battery for electric cars.

The critical case: platform power, housing supply and regulatory arbitrage.

The high-water mark of enterprise blockchain enthusiasm.

Insider account of Facebook's ads business by a product manager.

How Kenya's tech startups and M-Pesa grew, with interviews with their founders.

The Ansari X Prize and the start of commercial human spaceflight.

Practitioner account of how platform businesses capture a transaction.

Data economics of the shift from studios to streamers.

How licensing in place of sale strips buyers of control over what they paid for.

Why the regulated grid's economics are breaking.

Power in a networked age; connection as the source of advantage

Economics of trust and matching that make marketplaces like Airbnb work.

How Israel's military tech, from drones to cyber, feeds its commercial industry.

Autonomy from the incumbent and Waymo side.

Reporting on the culture that produced Uber's 2017 crisis.

Insider account by the engineer who built the iPhone keyboard.

The revival of co-operatives and member ownership, online platforms included.

Why America lags in fibre-optic broadband, and the case against the cable incumbents.

The gig-work model Uber's unit economics depend on.

The gig economy's promises and realities, and the law on classifying its workers.

Tesla and the global shift away from the combustion engine.

The sceptical case: the tech sector is an enclave, not an economy.

The case that blockchain architectures displace the centralised web

Why complex systems fail, from Volkswagen to Everest, and how to design against it.

The commercial-space policy fight that let SpaceX in.

SpaceX against Blue Origin and the legacy contractors.

Field research on algorithmic management of drivers.

Oral history; Thiel and the PayPal cohort speak in their own words.

Insider account by Microsoft's president on tech policy and regulation.

By an early mentor and investor who turned against the company.

The case that programmatic advertising is a mispriced market.

How Vitalik Buterin and others built Ethereum and its smart contracts.

Insider memoir by the engineer whose blog post triggered the reckoning.

The self-driving contest Tesla bet its valuation on.

The demand side: what full electrification of homes and vehicles requires.

How renowned video game studios fell apart, and what happened to their staff.

GameStop and Citadel Securities' order flow; dramatised.

Peter Thiel biography with substantial Palantir founding material.

The streaming wars Netflix started, from the studios' side.

How intermediaries capture creative-work rents; the bear case for creators.

NASA insider on the policy fight that funded commercial crew.

The story of Tencent, Alibaba's main rival, and China's tech ambitions.

The Ethereum world and token economics FTX was built to trade.

Argument that online communities can become sovereign; crypto-native politics

Bootstrapped SaaS economics: pricing, churn, plateau.

Fast narrative of the takeover and the layoffs.

Built on the Facebook Files documents leaked by Frances Haugen.

Includes the authors' own interview with Bankman-Fried.

Twitter under Jack Dorsey's second spell as chief, through its sale to Elon Musk.

A tech reporter's memoir, including Sam Altman and OpenAI's board crisis.

Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, told through the employees who lived through it.

The OpenAI-DeepMind race that set the shape of Nvidia's customer base.

Insiders on Pentagon-Valley contracting where Palantir won

The founder scene around OpenAI, reported from inside the funding rounds.

Software's enemy is complexity, which grows through shallow modules and shortcuts.

Rules for readable code: short functions, clear names, one level of abstraction.

How to work alongside large language models across many kinds of knowledge work.

A catalogue of moves that improve existing code without changing what it does.

A programmer's craft: when code is good enough and what to automate.

How to use prize competitions, crowdfunding and communities to go big.

The process of design: how to invent things with new physical order and form.

The forces that have shaped technology since prehistory and now shape modern people.

Lessons from IBM's OS/360: why adding people to a late software project slows it.

The inventor's own account of his life and work, the main source for his biographers.

Interviews with leading programmers on the forces and traits behind their work.

A report on competition in the telephone industry.

How the IBM PC was built outside the normal organisation.

A forecast of vast software models that mirror the real world and change society.

How firms must use real-time information to serve never-satisfied customers.

The engineering design of liquid-propellant rocket engines, with 470 illustrations.

How a culture hands its judgement to machines, statistics and technical experts.

Out of print; Graham distributes it free as a PDF

Alternating fiction and essay, a rewrite of Nineteen Eighty-Four with a new ending.

Inside Lockheed's secret projects unit, from the U-2 to the stealth fighter.

Profiles of 15 leading computer scientists, eight of them Turing Award winners.

How firms can build value and competitive advantage from online virtual communities.

Insider account by a former Windows developer; hostile in tone.

Techniques for designing data structures in functional languages, with examples.

Predictions of computers passing the human brain and merging with human life.

Bandwidth-abundance thesis; useful as a period document of the bubble.

The chief engineer on designing, building, testing and flying the lunar module.

How the internet let amateurs topple old professions such as lawyers and stock gurus.

Five technological revolutions since 1771, and why each brings a financial bubble.

Tips and tools for securing Linux, Windows, BSD and Mac servers and networks.

Practical Lisp programming, from language features to projects like an mp3 server.

Cognitive science and learning theory applied to thinking and learning better.

Business-school style account of the memory and display strategy.

The long-run trends set to reshape economies and markets over the coming decades.

How the problem-solving and teamwork of games could solve real-world problems.

How the internet changed politics and economies in Iran, Estonia, Korea and Senegal.

The case that fast-improving technology will make scarce resources cheap.

Popular account of algorithms taking over trading and other trades.

How Safaricom built the world's reference mobile-money business.

How Bell Labs turned research into the transistor, the laser and information theory.

Tight narrative of the Model T years; the best short account.

The short life of Danny Lewin and Akamai Technologies, which changed the internet.

Mechanisms for writing parallel and concurrent programs in Haskell.

Technical survey of the early vehicles and contracts.