Computer wars
by Charles H. Ferguson · first published 1993
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…The Making of the Personal Computer High Stakes, No Prisoners - history of the birth of the Internet written by the founder of FrontPage, with a keen critique of Netscape's history - Charles Ferguson Computer Wars - a look at the decline of IBM by the early 90s - Charles Ferguson Valley of Genius: The Uncensored History of Silicon Valley - An oral history of the Valley in the 80s and 90s.
on “Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books?” ↗The book is pretty great. I'll put it with "The soul of a new machine", Ferguson's "Computer Wars" and Lapsley's "Exploding the phone" as top narrative tech books.
on “Second-guessing the modern web (2020)” ↗I highly recommend Charles Ferguson's "Computer Wars" on this topic, as well as his other book (about startups and the early Web), "High Stakes, No Prisoners."
on “How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer Market” ↗Check out Computer Wars by Ferguson for probably a better version of that. The Ferguson book sent me down a lot of historical rabbit holes that didn't have wikipedia pages yet and I had to pull up things on like newspapers.com…
on “Ask HN: Good Books on the History of Technology?” ↗try Computer Wars: How the West Can Win in a Post-IBM World. By Charles H. Ferguson from 1993. The author is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Ferguson_(filmmaker) this one
on “Microsoft employees recall their early years” ↗I agree. Those emails/PDFs released in the DOJ case very enlightening and proved a lot of what Charles Ferguson was talking about in his books, "Computer Wars", "High Stakes, No Prisoners". MSFT was even afraid of AOL, Oracle, and others teaming up to offer a home appliance (eg. a net PC) at low prices and undercutting the PC industry. Of course, those partnerships…
on “Why did Microsoft create C#? Wasn't Java good enough in the 1990s?” ↗…https://people.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/fs.html That has an interesting quote: > Note the coverage of FS and what they describe as its "toxic aftereffects" on the corporation in Chapter 3 of Charles Ferguson and Charles Morris, Computer Wars: The Post-IBM World, Times Books, 1993. An excerpt: >> Most corrosive of all, the old IBM candor died with F/S. Top management, particularly Opel, reacted defensively as F/S headed toward a debacle.…
on “IBM's future system of the past” ↗