Steven Levy

Seems like the wildwest of coding back then. I love reading this stuff. If you are into the history of computing check out Steven Levy's books, http://www.stevenlevy.com/ I have read hackers and crypto and they were decent reads.

In the wake of new attempts to "ban encryption", I'd recommend reading Crypto by Steven Levy (2001). https://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/crypto

Steven Levy's "Crypto" [http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/crypto] is a good read on this topic if you're looking for something more in-depth.

Recommended reading, if you haven't already: Crypto[1]. It covers a lot of history in a readable format (especially if you're not a mathematician) and deals with a lot of the shrouded history of cryptography in America, the NSA, etc. [1] http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/crypto

I started Steven Levy's Hackers and I'm really enjoying it. http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers Seeing as he wrote Crypto and Insanely Great too, it seems to be his kind of thing. Also folklore.org is a nice collection of fables on how the sausage got made. Charles Petzold's Code is interspersed with enjoyable historical perspective too. http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/

Have you read: Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy? http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers Artificial Life is also great and has a kind of similar feel to it too.

One of my favorite non-fiction computer related books is 'Hackers - Heroes of the Computer Revolution' http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/other-books/hackers Very nice list, a lot I haven't heard of.

It's a pleasant ad, though it also reminds me of http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/05/08/the-sophie-choice : "There were no actors seen in the Super Bowl commercial, and that was part of its charm: even though it broke one taboo, it maintained the company’s geeky dignity of logic and verifiability. The star was the stuff that appeared on the computer screen. But “Dear Sophie” is more of a classic form of Madison Avenue pitching. It’s probably something that Don Draper would come up with if Larry and Sergey were his clients. They would tell him that their product, the Chrome browser, has a lot going for it over its competitors, like speedier response and a single box to type in addresses and search queries. It runs Web applications more efficiently than other browsers, they’d tell him, and if everyone used it, it would hasten a new paradigm of cloud apps. Draper would say that all that stuff is well and good. But for our commercial, we’re going to show a tear-jerking evocation of a father compiling an online scrapbook for to his daughter as she grows up. Straight out of the Kodak playbook–don’t brag about your specs, but play that song about Where Are You Going My Little One, and out will come the handkerchiefs. It’s also a stratagem used by banks and insurance companies." Mind you, that was two years ago and feels somewhat like ancient history now.

Ray Ozzie here. Regarding "minitruth" - you've got to maintain a bit of a sense of humor when things get stressful. It was such a long time ago, but one thing that clearly differentiates our efforts in those days vs. what's been reported in the news in the past few days is the issue of transparency. The day we shipped the "differential workfactor" implementation in Notes, I keynoted the RSA Conference and gave a speech laying out what we did and why. Charlie Kaufman, a great cryptographer who worked for me, also distributed a paper he wrote with the technical details. You can find my speech and his paper buried in here if you're interested. (search for "lotus.notes") http://web.textfiles.com/ezines/HWA/hwa-hn19.txt And if you're really motivated to understand what it was like during the Crypto Wars, go read Steven Levy's book "Crypto". http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/crypto Back to the present - it pains me to see such a lack of transparency in how our elected officials are running our government. Of course, the common man knows it's common sense that there's an inherent need for secrecy in conducting small scale covert operations. We do get it. However, it's also common sense that it's inevitable that any complex large-scale long-term operation will ultimately come to light. And so it's just common sense that any such broad-based operations that might be perceived as impacting our constitutional rights should be the subject of broad public debate. …

The Mysterious Island - Jules Verne. Probably my first favorite book, which I've read about 10 or 12 times in my life. Just re-read it again a few weeks ago. Never gets old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mysterious_Island The three titles in The Newsflesh Trilogy by Mira Grant. I'm not normally real big on zombie stories, but this one was a breath of fresh air. Part zombies, part conspiracy story, and wildly entertaining. http://miragrant.com/newsflesh.php Living Low Carb - Jonny Bowden. Picked this up after I was diagnosed as diabetic, and needed to clean up my diet and lose some weight. Very detailed book, explains the endocrine cycle and the relationship between carbs, fat, insulin, etc. very well, and makes a compelling case for eliminating most carbs from one's diet. I've been following this approach for the last 2-3 months and feel pretty good about it. My weight is coming down, even though I'm not doing a lot more exercise (that part will come eventually, but for now I'm basically just doing on mountain bike ride of about 2 hours, on Saturdays). http://www.amazon.com/Living-Low-Carb-Controlled-Carbohydrate-Long-Ter… The Startup Owner's Manual - Steve Blank and Bob Dorf. The successor to the famous The Four Steps to the Epiphany, this is the Bible of Customer Development. http://www.stevenblank.com/startup_index_qty.html Winning The Knowledge Transfer Race - kinda niche, but important to me, vis-a-vis Fogbeam Labs. Our space is…

Tierra[0], written by Tom Ray[1], immediately comes to mind. I was captivated when I read about it, as a teenager, in Steven Levy's "Artificial Life"[2]. Having played Core War[3], the description of Tierra in Levy's book inspired me to play around with making a virtual machine in Turbo Pascal and trying my hand at making a pale and naive clone. It was a lot of fun, and arguably has influenced a lot of my thinking about the origin of biological life. [0] https://tomray.me/tierra/whatis.html [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_S._Ray [2] https://www.stevenlevy.com/artificial-life [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_War

Not a movie but there's more about Woz in here than anyone else... http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers

Read http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/05/10/why-google-does-not-own-skyp… to find out why it was that Google didn't buy Skype.

I wrote a couple of programs for ITS after it was resurrected. Tetris: http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/ITSter.txt Conway's Life: http://web.onetel.com/~hibou/life.txt ITS page on Ward's Wiki: http://wiki.c2.com/?IncompatibleTimeSharingSystem (Incidentally the correction to the wiki article in file names is wrong: file names were two words, each of six characters.) Steven Levy's Hackers (http://www.stevenlevy.com/index.php/books/hackers) contains the history of its development. More information on ITS, and how to run it, can be found at http://its.victor.se/wiki/ And coolest of all, someone's got a PDP-10 running ITS on a FPGA: http://fpgaretrocomputing.org/pdp10x/