The author was the chief Silicon Valley writer for The Wall Street Journal during the first of the 1990s. He went on to become an acclaimed scholar in the history of science, engineering, and innovation. At the peak of his journalism career, the Boston Globe described Zachary as the most talented reporter on the Journal's staff. Zachary went on to write technology and innovation columns for The New York Times, Technology Review, and Spectrum magazine. Zachary has also taught courses on science and technology studies at Stanford University, UC Berkeley, and Arizona State University, where he was a professor from 2010-2020. He lives in northern California.
I wrote
Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
In the 1970s, Brooks was the leading thinker on managing large software projects in the world, and unexpected delays in completing complex coding tasks were emerging as a costly headache for large organizations. Brooks was considered a software luminary within IBM, which dominated the digital world in the era before the advent of the personal computer.
“In many ways, managing a large computer programming project is like managing any other large undertaking, but in many other ways it is different – in more ways than most professional managers expect,” Brooks dryly declared in the opening lines of a book destined to become a classic. He went on to explore specific challenges in the book’s 15 terse chapters, the second chapter, which gave the title to the entire volume, he presented paradoxical insight that ultimately elevated the book to the status of a classic.
Brooks argued, persuasively and insistently, that adding more coders, or “man months,” to a project might actually cause the project to slow down, even to go into reverse. In short, with many coding projects, more people can mean less progress towards the end goal of a bug-free program. Brooks, who became a computer science professor at the University of North Carolina after leaving IBM, remains a luminary with much to teach programmers.
Few books on software project management have been as influential and timeless as The Mythical Man-Month. With a blend of software engineering facts and thought-provoking opinions, Fred Brooks offers insight for anyone managing complex projects. These essays draw from his experience as project manager for the IBM System/360 computer family and then for OS/360, its massive software system. Now, 20 years after the initial publication of his book, Brooks has revisited his original ideas and added new thoughts and advice, both for readers already familiar with his work and for readers discovering it for the first time.
The first software programmers, or coders for computers, were women. Abbate, a professor at Virginia Tech and author of Inventing the Internet, recaptures the vital role of women programmers at the dawn of digital computing, when in the 1940s and 1950s women often handled what was then viewed as an anonymous task of creating the coding for computers to carry out operations.
“Employed as technical experts from the very beginnings of digital computing,” Abbate writes in her penetrating study, “women were inventing careers and professional identities at the same time that the field took shape.” By the 1960s, when computing spread, men began supplanting women as frontline programmers, a trend that resulted in the software becoming male-dominated by the end of the 20th century. Because women now flock to code writing, and are becoming once more central players in the creation of software, Abbate’s history illuminates a neglected chapter of the history of coding.
Along with David Grier’s book, When Computers Were Human, about the role of women in programming pre-digital calculating machines, Recoding Gender is a must-read to grasp the importance of diversity in the past, present, and future of software.
The untold history of women and computing: how pioneering women succeeded in a field shaped by gender biases.
Today, women earn a relatively low percentage of computer science degrees and hold proportionately few technical computing jobs. Meanwhile, the stereotype of the male “computer geek” seems to be everywhere in popular culture. Few people know that women were a significant presence in the early decades of computing in both the United States and Britain. Indeed, programming in postwar years was considered woman's work (perhaps in contrast to the more manly task of building the computers themselves). In Recoding Gender, Janet Abbate…
A singular account by the project leader of an ambitious effort to create a pathbreaking software program, Startupis Kaplan’s splendid chronicle of his company’s visionary pursuit of merging the pen with the computer. With a doctorate in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania and a slew of connections in Silicon Valley, Kaplan seemed well-placed for success. But while saddening to him and his team, the failure of Go, his software company, made for a valuable story about the perils and possibilities of dreaming big in computer code.
The book is filled with valuable anecdotes and lessons from code-writers and includes a memorable line that embodies the highs and lows of Kaplan’s experience. Flush with confidence, he had named his company Go, and on the day the assets of his code-child were sold at auction, he wrote: “I had to accept that impossible, final truth: Go was gone. Six years, hundreds of jobs, $75 million – all gone.” What remained are lessons of placing too much emphasis on coding innovation and too little awareness of “what can happen to a young company,” Kaplan concludes, “when its timing is wrong, its technology too speculative, and its market not yet ready.”
Kaplan, a well-known figure in the computer industry, founded GO Corporation in 1987, and for several years it was one of the hottest new ventures in the Valley. Startup tells the story of Kaplan's wild ride: how he assembled a brilliant but fractious team of engineers, software designers, and investors; pioneered the emerging market for hand-held computers operated with a pen instead of a keyboard; and careened from crisis to crisis without ever losing his passion for a revolutionary idea. Along the way, Kaplan vividly recreates his encounters with eccentric employees, risk-addicted venture capitalists, and industry giants such as Bill…
The software interface for Apple’s innovative Macintosh was largely (and legally) modeled on system software designed at the Palo Alto < California research center of Xerox, an East Coast photocopy company whose stodgy executives failed to realize the value of the coding breakthroughs they had funded and nurtured in the heart of northern California’s computer cauldron. Before anyone at the top of Xerox realized the enormity of their errors, the company had licensed to Steve Jobs and Apple key software technologies that animated the Macintosh revolution in the 1980s. Hiltzik’s richly detailed and readable history, based on scores of interviews, is the best account of the epic failure of an American corporate icon. Apple and Jobs went on to achieve glory while Xerox ultimately became a zombie company, having missed the greatest industrial wave of the past 75 years.
During the 1970s and 1980s, a number of brilliant computer eccentrics were thrown together by Xerox at the Xerox PARC centre in Palo Alto, California. These people created inventions such as the first personal computer, the graphic user interface, the mouse and one of the precursors of the Internet. However, the bosses at Xerox never really appreciated these men or their innovations, and accused them of just fooling around. Then along came the outsiders, such as Steve Jobs of Apple Computing, who left the PARC with ideas that they would later exploit and make vast fortunes on, propelling them to…
Software runs the digital world. While Facebook, Amazon, and Google may look like services, they are run by code. The same for Twitter is essentially a networked program that enables mass communication in multiple directions. Bilton deftly follows four coders – Ev Williams, Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Noah Glass – who stun the software world with the dramatic impact of their software creation. While Bilton’s narrative emphasizes the quirky men who made Twitter, and falls short of explaining the coding achievements of this benighted quartet, Hatching Twitter provides a vivid reminder that success in software often doesn’t go with the sharpest understanding of how software works, and what programs deliver.
'A tale of Machiavellian plots and coups d'etat, it's just all so gripping' Chris Evans, BBC Radio 2
THE ULTIMATE 21ST CENTURY BUSINESS STORY
Since 2006, Twitter has grown from the accidental side project of a failing internet start-up, to a global icon that by 2013 had become an $11.5bn business. But the full story of Twitter's hatching has never been told before.
In his revelatory new book, New York Times journalist Nick Bilton takes readers behind the scenes of Twitter as it grew at exponential speeds, and inside the heads of the four hackers who created it: ambitious millionaire…
Showstopper is an epic techno-scientific creation story, about the making of a complex and sprawling piece of computer code by a team of code writers at what was the iconic software company in the 1990s, Microsoft. The narrative follows an ensemble cast of characters through their trials and triumphs in constructing a breakthrough program called Windows NT, versions of which remain of value today, notably in the field known as cloud computing. At the time of publication in 1994, Showstopper was widely reviewed: called “a compelling tale” by Newsweek, “riveting” by Harvard Business Review and “gripping” by Fortune magazine. remains in print. With the passage of time, Showstopper gained a cult following among code writers, both because of how the book captures life on the frontlines of computing.
I’m an OB/GYN, passionate about adventuring beyond what’s expected. This has led me to pivot multiple times in my career, now focusing on writing. I’ve written a play, The Post-Roe Monologues, to elevate women’s stories. I cherish the curiosity that drives outer and inner exploration, and I love memoirs that skillfully weave the two. The books on this list feature extraordinary women who took risks, left comfort and safety, and battled vulnerability to step into the unknown. These authors moved beyond the stories they’d believed about themselves–or that others told about them. They invite you to think about living fuller and bigger lives.
Tap Dancing on Everest, part coming-of-age memoir, part true-survival adventure story, is about a young medical student, the daughter of a Holocaust survivor raised in N.Y.C., who battles self-doubt to serve as the doctor—and only woman—on a remote Everest climb in Tibet.
The team attempts a new route up the East Face without the use of supplemental oxygen, Sherpa support, or chance for rescue. When three climbers disappear during their summit attempt, Zieman reaches the knife edge of her limits and digs deeply to fight for the climbers’ lives and to find her voice.
The plan was outrageous: A small team of four climbers would attempt a new route on the East Face of Mt. Everest, considered the most remote and dangerous side of the mountain, which had only been successfully climbed once before. Unlike the first large team, Mimi Zieman and her team would climb without using supplemental oxygen or porter support. While the unpredictable weather and high altitude of 29,035 feet make climbing Everest perilous in any condition, attempting a new route, with no idea of what obstacles lay ahead, was especially audacious. Team members were expected to push themselves to their…
