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Exploding the Phone: The Untold Story of the Teenagers and Outlaws who Hacked Ma Bell
Phil Lapsley · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Steven Levy · 455 pages
Today, technology is cool. Owning the most powerful computer, the latest high-tech gadget, and the whizziest website is a status symbol on a par with having a flashy car or a designer suit. And a media obsessed with the digital explosion has reappropriated the term "computer nerd" so that it's practically synonymous with "entrepreneur." Yet, a mere fifteen years ago, wireheads hooked on tweaking e
Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of the Internet
Katie Hafner, Matthew Lyon · 304 pages
Twenty five years ago, it didn't exist. Today, twenty million people worldwide are surfing the Net. Where Wizards Stay Up Late is the exciting story of the pioneers responsible for creating the most talked about, most influential, and most far-reaching communications breakthrough since the invention of the telephone. In the 1960's, when computers where regarded as mere giant calculators, J.C.R.
Thunderstruck
Erik Larson · 480 pages
A true story of love, murder, and the end of the world's "great hush." In Thunderstruck, Erik Larson tells the interwoven stories of two men--Hawley Crippen, a very unlikely murderer, and Guglielmo Marconi, the obsessive creator of a seemingly supernatural means of communication--whose lives intersect during one of the greatest criminal chases of all time.Set in Edwardian London and on the stormy
The Hacker Crackdown: Law and Disorder on the Electronic Frontier
Bruce Sterling · 314 pages
The Pentagon's Brain: An Uncensored History of Darpa, America's Top-Secret Military Research Agency
Annie Jacobsen · 568 pages
Since its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has grown to become the Defense Department's most secret, most powerful, and most controversial military science research and development agency. Created by President Eisenhower to prevent another Sputnik, and to focus primarily on defensive programs against nuclear weapons, the agency--and its imagination and sc
Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet
Andrew Blum · 304 pages
A travel book exploring the physical places and connections of the infrastructure of the Internet. Along the way, he explores data warehouses, meets some of the historical figures in the creation of the Internet and the people who keep everything humming along so we can get on with our virtual lives.
Fire in the Valley: The Making of the Personal Computer
Paul Freiberger, Michael Swaine · 463 pages
How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World
Steven Johnson · 293 pages
"From the New York Times-bestselling author of Where Good Ideas Come From and Everything Bad Is Good for You, a new look at the power and legacy of great ideas. In this illustrated volume, Steven Johnson explores the history of innovation over centuries, tracing facets of modern life (refrigeration, clocks, and eyeglass lenses, to name a few) from their creation by hobbyists, amateurs, and entrepr
The Pencil: A History Of Design And Circumstance
Henry Petroski · 434 pages
Cathedral, Forge, and Waterwheel: Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages
Frances Gies, Joseph Gies · 357 pages
"In this account of Europe's rise to world leadership in technology, Frances and Joseph Gies make use of recent scholarship to destroy two time-honored myths. Myth One: that Europe's leap forward occurred suddenly in the "Renaissance," following centuries of medieval stagnation. Not so, say the Gieses: Early modern technology and experimental science were direct outgrowths of the decisive innovati
The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokemon - The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World
Steven L. Kent · 616 pages
This book is a history of the Video Game Industry, from types of electronic entertainment that were available before video games, to the improvements up until the year 2001. It begins with a look at the origins of Pinball, and other novelty games, then on to games that were played on giant computers, and then finally to the invention of the Video game, and the growth of the industry. Each section
Glut: Mastering Information through the Ages
Alex Wright · 295 pages
What do primordial bacteria, medieval alchemists, and the World Wide Web have to do with each other? This fascinating exploration of how information systems emerge takes readers on a provocative journey through the history of the information age. Spanning disciplines from evolutionary theory and cultural anthropology to the history of books, libraries, and computer science, writer and informati
The Victorian Internet
Tom Standage · 227 pages
The Victorian Internet tells the story of the telegraph's creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it. From the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet, whose experiments proved that electricity could be transmitted over great distances, to Samuel F. B. Morse, who developed the first practical electric telegraph in 1837, to Tho
The Age of Edison: Electric Light and the Invention of Modern America
Ernest Freeberg · 361 pages
The late nineteenth century was a period of explosive technological creativity, but arguably the most important invention of the era was Thomas Edison's incandescent light bulb. Unveiled in his Menlo Park, New Jersey, laboratory in 1879, the light bulb overwhelmed Americans with the sense that they were witnessing the birth of a new age. More than any other invention, electric light marked the arr
The Soul of a New Machine
Tracy Kidder · 293 pages
"The Soul of a New Machine" is a non-fiction book written by Tracy Kidder and published in 1981. It chronicles the experiences of a computer engineering team racing to design a next-generation computer at a blistering pace under tremendous pressure. The machine was launched in 1980 as the Data General Eclipse MV/8000. The book won the 1982 National Book Award for Non-fiction and a Pulitzer Prize f
Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software
Scott Rosenberg · 400 pages
Why is software so hard? Hard to make well. Hard to deliver on time. Hard to use. Our civilization runs on software, yet the art of creating it continues to be a dark mystery, even to the experts, and the greater our ambitions, the more spectacularly we seem to fail. This book sets out to understand why, through the story of one software project--Mitch Kapor's Chandler, an ambitious, open-source e
Next: The Future Just Happened
Michael Lewis · 248 pages
In Liar's Poker the barbarians seized control of the bond markets. In The New New Thing some guys from Silicon Valley redefined the American economy. Now, with his knowing eye and wicked pen, Michael Lewis reveals how much the Internet boom has encouraged great changes in the way we live, work, and think. He finds that we are in the midst of one of the greatest status revolutions in the history of
The One Device: The Secret History of the iPhone
Brian Merchant · 416 pages
The secret history of the invention that changed everything - and became the most profitable product in the world. Odds are that as you read this, an iPhone is within reach. But before Steve Jobs introduced us to "the one device," as he called it, a cell phone was merely what you used to make calls on the go. How did the iPhone transform our world and turn Apple into the most valuable company e
The Great Bridge: The Epic Story of the Building of the Brooklyn Bridge
David McCullough · 622 pages
Built to join the rapidly expanding cities of New York and Brooklyn, the Brooklyn Bridge was thought by many at the start to be an impossibility destined to fail if not from insurmountable technical problems then from political corruption. (It was the heyday of Boss Tweed in New York.) But the Brooklyn Bridge was at once the greatest engineering triumph of the age, a surpassing work of art, a pr
River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West
Rebecca Solnit · 305 pages
An original telling of the story of Eadweard Muybridge, who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically, thus making movies possible. Solnit uses the story of Muybridge as a lens for a larger story about the transformation of time and space by railroads, telegraphy, photography, and myriad other contributions to the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. She bol
AC/DC: The Savage Tale of the First Standards War
Tom McNichol · 208 pages
AC/DC tells the little-known story of how Thomas Edison wrongly bet in the fierce war between supporters of alternating current and direct current. The savagery of this electrical battle can hardly be imagined today. The showdown between AC and DC began as a rather straightforward conflict between technical standards, a battle of competing methods to deliver essentially the same product, electrici
Digital Gold: Bitcoin and the Inside Story of the Misfits and Millionaires Trying to Reinvent Money
Nathaniel Popper · 416 pages
"A New York Times technology and business reporter charts the dramatic rise of Bitcoin and the fascinating personalities who are striving to create a new global money for the Internet age. Digital Gold is New York Times reporter Nathaniel Popper's brilliant and engrossing history of Bitcoin, the landmark digital money and financial technology that has spawned a global social movement. The notion o
Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War
Fred Kaplan · 338 pages
"As cyber-attacks dominate front-page news, as hackers displace terrorists on the list of global threats, and as top generals warn of a coming cyber war, few books are more timely and enlightening than Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War, by Slate columnist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Fred Kaplan. Kaplan probes the inner corridors of the National Security Agency, the beyond-t