Bored? Try reading these computing classics
I get bored on occasion (as does everyone), and I sometimes find myself just refreshing the same damned blogs over and over, willing the time to disappear until a new day can begin anew. Obviously, there are better ways to handle boredom. So I’ve started reading a bit more recently. Here are some intriguing tech-themed works you should check out the next time you find yourself struggling for reading material. You’ll broaden your knowledge of the field of computing and read fascinating tales of fascinating people. Never a dull moment! They’re all pretty hefty, so you’ll find yourself bookmarking them and reading them over the course of days.
- Free Software, Free Society (PDF) by Richard Stallman. This book is a collection of Stallman’s essays on his personal philosophies. Read it and find out where the free software movement (including everything GNU/Linux) came from. Stallman is a brilliant, insightful person whom I’ve had the pleasure of meeting twice, and I can’t recommend these essays enough. His takes on copyright and patents are so different than anything you’ve likely ever heard of before, they’re like a breath of fresh air in a stuffy corporate-dominated world.
- The Curse of Xanadu (HTML) by Gary Wolf, published in Wired. This is an incredibly in-depth novella-length examination of the rise and fall of Project Xanadu, the revolutionary software project you’ve likely never heard of that was designed to store the sum of human knowledge, decades before the World Wide Web came about. Modern computing owes so much to Project Xanadu, including the concept of related documents connected through the use of hyperlinks. As I read through it I kept finding myself thinking “Ah-hah! So that’s who invented that!” Project Xanadu had incredibly useful features designed into it as early as the 1960s, such as bi-directional links, that the World Wide Web never even came close to realizing. It’s taken the release of wiki software to finally realize most of the goals of Xanadu. Xanadu’s fatal flaw was that it was too ambitious, and many of the people involved in it were, to put it politely, unbalanced.
- Free as in Freedom (HTML), the biography of Richard Stallman by Sam Williams. Read Free Software, Free Society to find out what Stallman believes in, then read this biography to learn about how Stallman came to be the person he is. Stallman’s life is a fascinating tale. He’s an unqualified genius with a singular passion for writing software and spreading his ideas of software freedom. He’s also an incredibly quirky person. Even if you don’t care about the free software movement at all, you’ll enjoy this portrait of a unique, colorful personality.
- Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (HTML) by Stephen Levy. A book all about the hacker ethic, and an examination of the shifting meaning of the term over time (which has only gotten much worse in the intervening two decades since this book was published). I haven’t read this one yet, but it’s next on my list.
April 17th, 2008 at 09:51
I got a copy of Free Software, Free Society as part of my FSF new member package. I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but maybe sometime soon. (If you haven’t, you should consider joining the FSF.)
April 17th, 2008 at 14:24
Yes, I also have a print copy of FSFS hanging around. The Xanadu article is well worth reading, as it influenced a lot of the eventual technology that we did end up with. There’s also a remarkable documentary called “Hyperland,” made a few years before the Web was invented. It stars good friends Douglas Adams and Tom “Doctor Who” Baker. It covers not only Xanadu, but a lot of other work that was being done at the time on so-called “hypermedia.”
I would also recommend Code by Larry Lessig, which made me realize what is possible in the world of computing. Also, it’s not free, but The Mythical Man-Month is something that should be better known than it is among the current generation.