I've enjoyed a number of (fiction/non-fiction books) about hacker culture and running a software business in the 80's, 90's. For some reason things seemed so much more exciting back then. Examples are:Microserfs (Douglas Coupland)Accidental Empires (Robert X. CringelyAlmost Pefect (W.E. Peterson, online!)Coders at Work (Peter Seibel)Today I'm an entrepeneur and programmer. Back in the 80's a I was a young geek hacking DOS TSR's and coding GWBasic / QBasic. In the 90's I was a C.S. university student, experiencing the rise of the Internet world wide.When reading these books running a software business seemed so much more fun than it is nowadays. Things used to be so much simpler, opportunities seemed to be everywhere and the startups seemed to work with much more real problems (inventing spreadsheets, writing word processors in assembly on 6 different platforms) than all our current web 2.0 social networking toys.Does anyone share these feelings? Does anyone have any good (personal) stories from back then or know of other good books to read?
Books and stories on programming culture, specifically in the 80's / early 90's
books;history;culture
In no particular order:The Fugitive Game: Online with Kevin MitnickThe Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage Insanely Great: The Life and Times of Macintosh, the Computer That Changed EverythingWhere Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet CYBERPUNK: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer FrontierThe Watchman: The Twisted Life and Crimes of Serial Hacker Kevin Poulsen Takedown: The Pursuit and Capture of Kevin Mitnick, America's Most Wanted Computer Outlaw-By the Man Who Did It Geeks: How Two Lost Boys Rode the Internet Out of Idaho Soul of a New Machine - about DEC and one of their products in development.The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier by Bruce Sterling tells the story of the 'meeting' of law enforcement and the cracker/phreaker subculture of the 1990s. Also, it describes in detail the Secret Service raid on Steve Jackson Games. That little incident almost put SJG out of business, all for a role-playing supplement not, as the Secret Service described it, a hacker's manual.  Turns out that the Secret Service were actually after copies of a leaked Bell South E911 document.Programmers at Work - This likely inspired the Founders at Work and Coders at Work books.Free as in Freedom: Richard Stallman's Crusade for Free Software by Sam Williams.  It is a free biography of Richard Stallman, and contains lots of stories of programming culture at MIT.  If you're interested in the FSF and how the whole free software movement started this is worth a read.Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy (Wikipedia page on Hackers)  describes the people, the machines, and the events that defined the Hacker Culture and the Hacker Ethic, from the early mainframe hackers at MIT, to the self-made hardware hackers and game hackers. Show Stoppers StartupFounders at Work - interviews with startup founders, starting from the early 80's. It's more about how the founders built up their companies, but it has interesting insights into the programming culture prevalent then as well.