James Burke's book version of 'Connections' https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/55024.Connections

Also Douglas Coupland's 'Microserfs', described as "Here's a guy who seems to have spent a week with engineers and effortlessly absorbed everything that is important about engineering culture, everything that matters about working at a big company, and everything that matters about working at a startup." https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2748.Microserfs

"Cosmos" by Carl Sagan - that book was a life changer for me and has been with me ever since.

Turing's cathedral, on the invention and development of the earliest digital computers just before, during, and after WWII. Lots of excellent detail, descriptions of the personalities and relationships of many interesting people, like von Neumann.

Might sound silly but I LOVE: Stephen Biesty's Incredible Cross-Sections. They single handedly made me interested in how things were made, how things were on the inside. How things were engineered.

Richard Hamming's "The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn" is an insider's (Manhattan Project, Bell Labs) view of how computer science as we know it developed.

Technics and Civilization by Lewis Mumford and Critical Path by R Buckminster Fuller

The Maniac, by Benjamin Labatut. It’s a fictionalised biography of John von Nuemann and the birth of artificial intelligence. Amazing , surreal and unique

• pmdulaney

  yesterday at 9:21 PM

  How creative to think of writing such a thing! But von Meumann is a big enough intellect and personality to sustain it.

The Faber Book of Science (Carey) Asimov’s New Guide to Science (Asimov) The Great Influenza (Barry)

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop

Summa Technologiae

• hash0

  today at 6:47 AM

  Agreed, but with one caveat: That is the book detailling the history of future science!