If the history of computing and the internet intrigues you, I outright recommend reading that one.

Related to the story of one man’s life, it goes from pre-WW2 mechanical computing devices to the digital binary standard, first computers and their military use, roots of the networking and ARPANET, and up to PARC with basically modern PC setup - all in one story and more-or-less one generation, quite fascinating that.

I for one never knew exactly that biography (not quite, but close) of a psychologist - **J. C. R. Licklider,** could encompass the 20th-century history of computing, touching many fundamental parts and people.

But it does, and pretty organically too (Goodreads), even more so - the story gets to us time-tested not only because it explains the past, but because it was written in the 90s, published in ~2001 even before the Web 2.0 got to its glory.

From my previous perspective, it was a pretty common knowledge in at least CS-engineering adjacent circles that first computers were used in the military for air defense and/or projectile trajectory calculations, explosion modeling, such and such.

Somewhere along the way they’ve got to play back and forth with terminal-mainframe setup and back, and also quite a bit after that a few universities were connected in a network which was a predecessor of the Internet and some people at Xerox PARC showed the Jobs the proper GUI for OS and mouse and the rest of PC-history too.

All of that is directionally correct, depending on the level of detail one is satisfied with. However, the most interesting part that opened up to me was that it puts people behind that story, grants/projects/aims that were put before each of the stepstones there - from who was present on Shannon’s master thesis defense, to who personally pushed for funding of ARPA’ computing experiments.

Knowing such details does opens a lot of roads for future explorations, and does provide context for decisions made on things built that we use today (even in modern day-to-day tech processes, i.e. RFCs invented to collectively work/decide on the development of network protocols).

Twist there - that much of it was also a part of one person vision, that psychologist that I’ve started with. Their career during WW2, work in Harvard’ labs, MIT, industry, ARPA connects lots of dots and people in the story, human-computer interaction goes through up to development of proper interfaces and many-to-many internet communications. While it’s certainly not at all a one-hero story, author does nudge to think of a part I find most interesting years before first internet networks were built the Licklider ‘Lick’ started the network of people first.

He, basically singlehandedly, as a head of one of ARPA departments looked for the best researchers, groups, and institutions to provide almost (almost!) no-strings-attached money for directionally ‘correct’ research. Not only that, but it emphasized that a good chunk of effort was spent on actually connecting that set of brilliant people/labs/teams into actual community and offline relationship networks first which spanned a few decades, maybe some years before their unrelated work started bringing any meaningful fruits. Adding to all that - relative openness of research, resources was probably unseen at the time: they not only allowed, but later promoted tinkering, hacking, creating stuff down to the undergrads at those high-tech computing centres.

Source for thought there follows, and a good deal of the book also spent explaining following changes thereafter: that the development of computing & networking from those projects didn’t have an exact plan and weren’t exactly a part of the ideological thing (i.e. not patriotism-driven), they also weren’t ‘spray & pray’ (as people were immensely competent and pushing cutting edge, and were ‘free’ from say government procurement/committees too, however with some oversight. That’s all very curious indeed, as in the late part we presented with a PARC story and it’s quite a bit look of complete failure to monetize 10+ years edge in all things computing from that.

From all of the above, highly recommend to check it out - not only it’s interesting from the angle of very detailed accounts of the industry growing up, but also a few cases of ‘Innovator’ dilemmas’ in action, where the story from IBM to Xerox was born and opportunities were built, lost, built again.