Books and stories on programming culture, specifically in the 80's / early 90's

Posted by Ivo van der Wijk on Programmers See other posts from Programmers or by Ivo van der Wijk
Published on 2010-09-20T06:30:54Z Indexed on 2010/12/27 22:59 UTC
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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:

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?

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