Tim's Favorite Computer Industry History and Dot-Com Books!

I've always been into the history of computers and the tech industry, and in recent years the history of the whole “dot-com” thing (since I was working in for dot-coms from 1996 through 2004), and usually pick up any book I run across on the subject. If you're into it, the following 39 books I've read over the years are very interesting and entertaining. I link to them on Amazon.com for your convenience, many are available used really cheap!

Weaving the Web : The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by its Inventor
September 28, 2010 - Present
Currently Reading..

This book was written by the original developer of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee. The WWW project, first web server, browser and editing environment were originally developed on a NeXT computer CERN bought him while he was working there in 1990. Next would later br purchased from Steve Jobs by Apple Computer in late 1996, which would be the foundation for the new OS X operating system..

I know a lot of the story from other books and documentaries, but I am interested in hearing the story of how the web was invented and developed first hand from Tim. I will write a little more once I have finished the book.

The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius and Betrayal
May 28, 2010 - June 26, 2010
Just Finished..

Facebook is almost ubiquitous now, and everyone has an account. This book covers the story from the very beginnings at Harvard. It's amazing just how quickly it took off, getting up to a half million users in just a few months after launch in March of 2004. It is also interesting to hear some of the back story, and how Mark Zuckerberg basically screwed a competitor, Harvard Connection/ConnectU, by agreeing to finish their social networking site.. then doing no work on their site and while he strung them along creating a copy of their idea as a separate venture. Had he been honest with them they could have at least found another programmer to complete their project, but instead they were stalled by his deceit.

2010/10/03 Update: Just saw The Social Network movie based on this book. I liked it, but many say it has been embelished and spiced up for Hollywood. Either way, it made me think back to late 2003 and early 2004 when I was a contract developer. The whole “Web 2.0” and “social media” thing had not yet happened (even MySpace was just starting out), and I kept telling my girlfriend at the time that I just needed a good idea for a site. The idea never came to me. :(

Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software
March 26, 2010 - May 25, 2010 (Not finished)
Was Reading..

I think I originally heard about this book, a couple of years ago, from reading the Joel On Software blog (soon to be ending, dammit!). The book was written by Charles Petzold, a programmer who has been writing articles and software for Microsoft technologies for a few decades now.

He begins by covering the very early uses of various codes such as braille, Morse code, and covers how basic electronics work, and ties it all together showing how things relate. I've only read the first four chapters at this point, so I will write more once I have finished the book. So far it's pretty interesting though.

I bought this book from Ted Nelson's site on Lulu.com, full price, for around $20 bucks. I bought it from his page on Lulu since I thought he would probably get the biggest cut from the sale that way. But it is also available on Amazon.com too (see right).

For being a self-published book this turned out to be pretty good, I almost appreciate more the lack of a publishers polish and hearing the author's raw thoughts. It's a good book, and Ted has always been known as a deep thinker. He came up with Xanadu back in 1960, which proposed “hyperlinks” and some of the ideas the web uses now, and he also published “Computer Lib” back in 1974. I also learned that the “.com” TLD for business was finally just chosen by Elizabeth Feinler when nobody could come to a concensus.

Throughout the text I could also feel an overriding tone of frustration on how the web ended up turning out. Ted had much grander plans for his project Xanadu, and computer filesystems in general (he is not a fan of the hierarchal structure of the web and operating system filesystems we inherited from UNIX).

Turing and the Universal Machine: The Making of the Modern Computer
May 29, 2009 - July 3, 2009

I picked this up for $3.98 at my local Half Price Books down the street. Alan Turing is regarded as the “father of the modern computer”, and was instrumental in breaking the Nazi's Enigma code during World War II, and his contributions probably kept Germany from winning the war.

The popular computing term “Turing Complete” is named after him. He ended up committing suicide in 1954 after persecution for being gay.

Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet
May 14, 2009 - May May 28, 2009

This is another book I found used at the local Half Price Books cheap. It's about how the network that would become the ARPANet, and later the Internet, was conceived. Most people have probably never heard of most of the people who originally worked on and created the Internet, and I think it's a shame. Most of the original BBN engineers who worked their asses off to invent packet switching and everything else needed to make a distributed network work possible never got famous, or wealthy, from their important work. They deserve both though. Ray Tomlinson inmplemented email on the new network, and came up with the idea to separate a user from their host with the @ sign. Len Kleinrock came up with the idea of packet switching in his Ph.D thesis, and helped bring up the first node on the ARPAnet at UCLA in 1969. Bob Kahn and Vint Cerf came up with the TCP/IP protocols in 1974, which still power the Internet to this day.

Much of this stuff I already knew from other books, and Robert X. Cringely's “Nerds 2.0.1” documentary from 1998, but this books adds more details and fleshes out the story a bunch more. It's a good read.

Apple: The Inside Story of Intrigue, Egomania, and Business Blunders
March 16, 2009 - May 7, 2009

I just started this book about the history of Apple Computer up until 1997 or so. So far I have read the first two chapters and it has been interesting reading. The author also mentions another book "Odyssey" that former Apple CEO, John Scully, wrote in 1987 at Apple's peak. I need to remember to add that one to my Amazon.com wish list for the future..

Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire
February 25, 2009 - March 13, 2009

This book is about Bill Gates and the building of the Microsoft empire, up until around 1991 when it was written. It offers an inside view into the early years of Microsoft, with quite a bit of information on Bill. Some of the usual stuff like how he only flies coach (although he probably doesn't now) when traveling, and how he was the only the 5th higest paid employee of his company in 1991 with pay of $274,000, compared with other CEOs who were milking their companies for millions each year in salary and bonuses. Bill gates is an interesting character, and this was a pretty good book. Defiitely worth reading.

iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It
January 15, 2009 - January 21, 2009

I have been meaning to read this book for a while now, and picked it up when I noticed it on the shelf of my local Half Price Books down the street yesterday. I've read the first 5 chapters over the past day, and so far I am enjoying it. He of course starts telling his story from when he was a young boy with his father, an engineer working a top-secret job with the government, teaching him about electronics. He also touches on some events like the Vietnam war's affects on his thinking, his brief college career, learning to design computers and redesigning popular computers of the time (with fewer chips, or course), and how he first met Steve Jobs.

Woz writes in a very conversational style, and while reading the book I can imaging him telling the story the same way if he were speaking. At first glance it sounds like it is written toward a young audience, but having seen Woz in interviews it sounds like it was written just like he would say it, in a very unpretentious way. I really admire Steve Wozniak and what he's done, so I am anxious to finish the book. :)

Amazonia: Five Years at the Epicenter of the Dot.Com Juggernaut
December 6, 2008 - December 31, 2008

This is a good book offering an interesting look inside the early Amazon.com. The author, employee #55, started at Amazon as a book reviewer when they were only shipping 2,000 books each day, and average employees like himself had access to "flip the site" (make the day's changes live on the Internet) at the end of the day. He also describes his interview with Amazon's founder Jeff Bezos, which probably never happens anymore since the company is so big. He also put together his own desk, consisting of a solid wood door, which I had heard they used to do before but wasn't sure if it was actually true.

This is the second book I have read about life at Amazon.com, the first being "21 Dog Years", which was also quite good.

Burn Rate: How I Survived the Gold Rush Years on the Internet
October 5, 2008 - November 20, 2008

I picked this book up cheap as a used copy on Amazon.com. This is an early Internet entrepreneur's account of starting his own "dot-com" in late 1994 until leaving the company in 1997 or so. The author was a writer in New York City and left that business to try to cash in on potential riches in the online world. He gives a pretty good look at the inside world of trying to run a business, raise investment money (over and over), make deals with type-A business douche bags, while also trying to be true to his writer roots. He's disappointed to learn that people online don't like to read, but I think that's true of most Americans now.

His business is somewhat successful, but he doesn't hit the jackpot he was looking for, and in the end seems to just want to get out and be free of the crap he dealt with for his few years riding the Internet tidal wave. One interesting thing is that he mentions my old CEO at Hoover's Online, Patrick Spain, several times as Pat tried to help him get in with AOL. Hoover's had entered the online world via AOL earlier. When I started work at Hoover's in early 2000 Spain was still the CEO, and my CTO at the time had me fetch him a beer on occasional Friday afternoons.It was interesting reading and tied me to the story in a small way. Overall it was a good read.

Everyone Else Must Fail: The Unvarnished Truth About Oracle and Larry Ellison
September 19, 2008 - September 25, 2008

There are very few Fortune 500 companies and CEOs I admire, but I do admire a few like Larry Ellison (Oracle) and Steve Jobs (Apple). This book is about Larry Ellison and the company he founded and has been running for over 30 years now. It turned out to be a great book and very interesting read. Larry is probably one of the most unique personalities in the tech industry. The author shed some light on what drives him, starting with events in his childhood that shaped the crazy bastard that he has become. After reading this book I think I understand him a little better.

Larry Ellison is still one of my favorite tech personalities. I would definitely recommend this book!

Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution
June 14, 2008 - June 22, 2008

This is another book I read for free online, but I'll probably pick up a used hard copy at some point. It was different in that each chapter was writter by a different author, each being a developer or prominent figure in the open source community. Richard Stallman wrote a chapter on GNU software and the Free Software Foundation he founded in 1984. Michael Tiemann wrote a chapter on his experiences starting one of the first commercial open source companies and his work on the GCC compiler. And of course Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux back in 1991, contribute a chapter on his experiences in starting the Linux kernel project. There are a bunch of other chapters, these were just the ones I enjoyed most. Definitely a book worth checking out if you're a Linux geek.

eBoys: The First Inside Account of Venture Capitalists at Work
March 26, 2008 - September 18, 2008

I needed to find some more books to read during a week off work in early April, so I wandered around my local Half Price Books nearby, and found this one for $4.98 which I'm reading now. It's an inside look into the lives and work of some Silicon Valley venture capitalists at Benchmark Capital. They invested in eBay, Webvan (now famously defunct), and some other billion dollar tech startups you've probably heard of.

Published in 2000, it should be some good nostalgic "Bubble 1.0" reading. I'll post more once I've finished reading it. :)

Written by Gil Amelio about his time as CEO of Apple Computer CEO for 17 months in 1996 and early 1997, just before Steve Jobs returned as "interim CEO" (and never left). I really enjoyed this book. For a long time I had thought of Gil's time at Apple as inefectual, like a tech CEO version of the Jimmy Carter presidency. His book gets into the highly disfuctional style that had taken over Apple and the executive staff. I gained a lot of respect for Amelio upon finishing his book. He seems to have had quite an up-hill battle, yet managed to make some headway and had some good ideas. He seems to be a thoughtful, smart man who took on an impossible task and gave it a valiant effort. I'm still a huge fan of Steve Jobs, but I think Gil was duped and manipulated by Jobs in the end.

One thing I never knew, but learned from Gil's book, was that at one point Microsoft was being considered to create the next generation Macintosh operating system, along with other contenders like Be OS, Solaris (from Sun), and the eventual winner NeXT. Imagine if, instead of the current OS X, we had a Microsoft operating system on Apple machines?! Wild.

Renegades of the Empire: How Three Software Warriors Started a Revolution Behind the Walls of Fortress Microsoft
January 19 - February 29, 2008

I picked this book up from Half Price Books down the street. It's about three developers, Alex St. John, Craig Eisler and Eric Engstrom, the "Beastie Boys", working as Microsoft evangelists in the late 1990's who take on the task of making Windows 95 the top gaming platform over DOS, which still dominated gaming at the time since Windows was too slow graphically. They started DirectX and the book covers the internal and external battles with OpenGL, and how internal groups within Microsoft fight and try to kill off each other's projects, and St. John's craziness and excessive promotional events.

St. John ends up getting himself fired (on purpose), Eisler ends up becoming a manager and behaving himself, and Engstrom starts another project called "Chrome", which is eventually killed off, and sounds remarkably like the new "Silverlight" project Microsoft has been hyping since late 2007. The end of the book also gets into Microsoft's legal troubles with the anti-trust case the Department of Justice and several states brought against them. Engstrom turns out to be the best, of 12, witness for Microsoft in the DoJ trial. It was a pretty cool inside look at the workings of an enormous software company.

Competing on Internet Time: Lessons From Netscape & Its Battle with Microsoft
July 20, 2007 - October 12, 2007
September 25, 2008 - October 6, 2008

This book covered the story of Netscape, up until 1998 when the book was written. It also talked quite a bit about their battle with Microsoft. At the time the book was written it was only about 4 months after the company had released its browser source code and started the "Mozilla" project. This was also before the AOL buyout that happened within the following year. It was interesting toward the end to hear the author's thoughts on Netscape's challenges that layed ahead at that time, even expressing some optimism that they might still make it in the enterprise with their server software since selling browsers was over.

Although we all know what happened in the end, I am always interested in hearing about the details of the story and what happened. Another interesting and well done documentary of a portion of Netscape's history is covered in the VHS documentary "Code Rush" that covers the time leading up to their releasing the web browser code as open source, and being acquired by AOL.

I do have to warn that I found this book fairly dry and hard to get through. The writing style is matter-of-fact and the text is littered with excerpts from the author's interviews with some of the players in the story. You will probably be much more entertained watching the VHS tape "Code Rush" I mentioned above.

This was a great book, and very entertaining. I read it whenever I had some spare time over 4 days. Mike Daisey started at Amazon.com when there were only around 300 other employees there and worked there for a few years in varying job capacities, starting in customer service. He tells the story of his time at the dot-com and gives lots of often funny details you would not hear anywhere else. In the first chapter he talks about being a dilettante and a "slacker", and at times he was describing me, heh.

Mike has a great writing style and sense of humor, and I would highly recommend this book. It's right up there with Microserfs on the badassness scale. :)

When I started reading this I didn't know that it was fiction, it reads like an actual young geek's recollections in the early to mid 1990's. It's about a group of young Microsoft employees and their life, or lack thereof, on the job, and subsequent tech venture after a group move to Silicon Valley.

The story was great, and the writing style was incredible and sounded like an actual young geek was writing about his daily life at Microsoft and his own startup thereafter. Highly recommended reading! :)

The stories in this book were actually started back in the second half of 2003 by Andy Hertzfeld for his web site Folklore.org where he wanted to document, along with help from others that worked on the project, the story of the development of the original Macintosh computer. Andy wrote much of the original operating system and system toolbox in the ROM from 1981 through it's initial release in early 1984.

Andy is a likeable guy and down to Earth writer, and he relays his stories well. Even if you are not a programmer geek you will probably enjoy this book, since it's not all techno jargon. But for those of us who are code geeks too he does include quite a bit of information on that too. It doesn't bog down the stories though. It's a great read.

I used to play Quake II with the crew back when I worked at a local ISP in Phoenix in 1998, and this book documents the history of id Software and the how it all started. It gives some early background on the founders, John Carmack and John Romero, and how they met while working for Softdisk in Shreveport, Louisiana, and shortly thereafter in late 1990 made a breakthrough with scrolling game graphics and decided to leave and start their own company.

It traces the company and characters through moves from Louisiana to Wisonsin, and how they ended up in Mesquite, Texas (where ID Software still remains), and all of the incredible advances they made with their games and John's game engines along the way. Also covered is John Romero's departure from ID and a big venture, and failure, after. It's a great read if you're into geek history. :)

This was a great book covering the first 3 years of the open-source personal information manager (PIM) application Chandler. Chandler was started by Mitch Kapor who created Lotus 1-2-3 in the 1980's which then dominated spreadsheets and office suites until Microsoft took it over in the 1990's.

The Chandler project was not complete, not even to a 1.0 release, by the time Scott Rosenberg wrote the book. As of today it still is only to a 0.7 beta release version, but is now at least somewhat functional for the calendar. The book gives the inside story of the extensive planning and ideas that went into the start of the project, and follows the delays and personnel changes as the project went on.

Some legendary software people were involved in the project at various points too. Andy Hertzfeld, who authored most of the original Apple Macintosh OS software in the early 1980's, was involved early on and helped get them to choose Python as the application's primary programming language. He had used Python to create his popular site Folklore.org which later was turned into the book Revolution in the Valley.

I was especially interested in this book since I've been running and using Linux since early 1997. It's about the origins of the Linux operating system and the open source software movement that sprung up in the early 1990's, primarily focusing on the Linux community. It was first publiblished in 2000 and later revised in 2001 or 2002, so it's not completely up-to-date, but it covers the history pretty well and it was good reading.

I also learned about quite a few more prominent figures in open source development, like Miguel de Icaza who started the Gnome and Mono projects for Linux. It truly is an interesting story if you're into software development history.

The Art of UNIX Programming
February 2007 - January 17, 2008 (read online at work, on and off for months)

I found this book available to read online for free, so I've been reading through it at work since things have been slow there lately. I'm about half way through at the moment, and so far I'm really enjoying it.

Although, as the title suggests, it's about UNIX programing, it isn't a text one would read to learn programming. There aren't many code examples in it either. The book gives some background on the UNIX community and how it has developed since UNIX and the C programming language were conceived by Dennis Ritchie in 1969 at Bell Labs.

The author, Eric S. Raymond, states in the beginning that the book is meant to explain the how and why about UNIX development and how it compares to some other popular platforms. He also covers the Linux and open-source community quite a bit too. I'll re-write this once I finish the book.

I read this book online for free, but enjoyed it so much I plan to order the paper version soon. I usually prefer printed books over reading them online, but I was looking for something to read during slow points at work and happened upon this book while searching online.

The book is fairly short, and the author, Eric S. Raymond, discusses how the open-source community has evolved and why it has become so successful in developing great projects. He focuses quite a bit on Linus Torvalds and how he developed Linux from a personal project based on Minix into a major operating system maintained by lots of programmers all over the world.

Update: I finally bought a hardcover copy for $5.98 I found at my local Half Price Books on 03/23/2008. Yay!

This book has lots of great high quality photos of old computers. But for some unknown reason it also includes some data and photos on console gaming machines from the 90's.. Not sure why though.

The book was written and published in the U.K., so there are a number of errors, but overall the full-color photos of the classic computers make up for it. I wish the author, or at least his editor, would have done a little more research though. Some of the errors are common knowledge among geeks and should have been fixed before printing.

On pages 11 and 13 the author repeatedly refers to "Practical Electronics" instead of the correct "Popular Mechanics" as the magazine that introduced the ALTAIR on its cover in 1975. They even italisize the error in each instance, d'oh. :)

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
Purchased on July 13, 2006 from Amazon.com

This book was great, I should have read it a long time ago. It was published in 1985 when I was learning to program BASIC on my Atari 800XL with the Atari 1010 cassette tape drive for storage since since I couldn't afford a floppy disk drive. :)

Hackers covers the history (up until 1985 anyway) of computers from a different angle than any other book I've read on it, starting with the "Tech Model Railroad Club" (TMRC) at MIT back in the mid-1950's.

From their beginnings hacking on an old TX-0 and later a DEC PDP-1, he follows their eventual path into business and their conflicts with remaining true to the "Hacker Ethic".

Also interesting is how the whole computer game industry began. It's an interesting story, and the industry seems to have began almost by accident, programming in assembly language for the early Apple II and Atari computers. But soon it became big business as expected, and several companies and developers are covered.

This is a great book. I found my used hardcover copy on Amazon.com pretty cheap. Pick it up if you see it in a used book store.

Ellen Ullman writes well for a software engineer. Although I think it's non-fiction, this book almost reads like a fiction story in a way.

It's a peek into the life of a software engineer working in the still young web and dot-com world. Her inner conflict between her former communist beliefs and the acquisition of material wealth in Silicon Valley, while trying to work on projects that help people instead of just for the pursuit of money, is interesting too.

This was a great book. Covering the MITS Altair through the development of the Apple machines, IBM PC, the PC clones, and right up to the "browser wars" of the later 1990's. Lots of anecdotal stuff on the history of the development of the personal computer industry.

One of my favorite things about this book that sets it apart from the others is the 64 glossy pages of black and white photos of everything from the old ENIAC, the Altair, various characters in the book, Woz and Apple, Microsoft, and even the schematic to the original Apple I machine. Very cool stuff. :)

This book covers the story of computer companies in "the valley" (Silicon Valley) in California and how several huge fortunes were amassed. Venture Capitalists, CEOs, and other rich geeks are profiled.

I dig how the author even goes into Woodside, California, where many of the movers and shakers of Silicon Valley live, and gets into their lives outside of their .coms at home.

dot.bomb: My Days and Nights at an Internet Goliath
Purchased June 6, 2002 from Amazon.com

This is a real story of Craig Wynn and the rise and fall of a "dot-com" during the first "bubble." It was interesting reading the first hand accounts of the incredible juggling act they performed to try to build a huge company based on a new idea and way of doing business. The struggle to get more and more financial backing, then burning through the cash with little to show for it, and eventual collapsing of the house of cards they had built. The story is probably very similar to hundreds of other dot-com's of the bubble era in the late 1990's. I myself worked for three dot-com companies that went bankrupt during the second half of the 1990's, so it was interesting to me since I had lived through some it at my own companies.

StrikingitRich.Com: Profiles of 23 Incredibly Successful Websites You've Probably Never Heard Of

If you've ever wanted to start a dot-com business this book is some interesting reading. The profiles include a lot more than just the technical or business stuff other books cover. This one gets a little more into the story of each company and the people that started the companies.

Published in 1999, this book was written before the dot-com "crash". Things were still relatively new, and the possibilities and excitement for starting up new dot-com ideas was still running high. It's good reading, and you can even learn something from some of the sites profiled.

Having worked for dot-com's from 1996 through 2002 and as a contractor with a dot-com till 2004, I really enjoyed this book. There's some humor and a lot of truth in it, and it tells the story of quite a variety of different types of dot-com workers (the "net slaves").

The author assigns various humorous titles to the types and classes of workers: Garbagemen, Cops and Streetwalkers, Social Workers, Cab Drivers, Cowboys and Card Sharks, Fry Cooks, Gold Diggers and Gigolos, Priests and Madmen, Robots, Robber Barrons, and Mole People. This is good stuff, you should check it out.

This is an interesting and fun book covering the exploits and unauthorized phone system exploration by some New York computer crackers in the late 1980's and early 1990's. It covers people like "Phiber Optik" (aka Mark Abene) and many others, including some Austin, Texas hackers (where I'm from now) of the time too. Kinda cool.

If you're in your 30's or early 40's, and were into computers back then, you might remember groups like "MOD" and "LOD". This book tells their story and it's some interesting reading.

I read this book shortly after moving to Austin for work in early 2000. Being a programmer the history of computers has always interested me.

This is good reading, if you're into it. It covers the saga of Presper Eckert and John Mauchly creating the first electronic digital computer in the 1940's. It's pretty interesting reading. We take for granted how we can buy a "stick of RAM" that has 512mb on it for the price of a few cases of beer these days. Back in the day these guys were figuring out how in the hell do you store things electronically at all, it had never been done before. Vaccum tubes were used since solid-state electronics using transistors was years away, and silicon chips containing multiple transistors was a couple of decades or more away. Amazing stuff indeed.

This book, written by Jonathan Littman, gives the other view of the Kevin Mitnick story. Jonathan was in contact with Kevin during his time on the run, and also provides quite a bit of background on his life in addition to the events leading up to his capture in 1995.

Although law enforcement and the media painted him as a cyber-terrorist and dangerous criminal, it seems he was mostly a computer addict who had no respect for other people's digital privacy. A bastard and thoughtless fucker yes, but major criminal causing millions of dollars in damage I think not.

This book was written by Tsutomu Shimomura, a computer scientist at the University of California at San Diego. His SUN workstations at home and at his office were hacked into by Kevin Mitnick while on the run from the FBI. He had cell phone software Mitnick wanted on his computers.

For the most part this book is a self-serving and ego-stroking account of the part he played in helping track down Mitnick after his computers were broken into and his source code copied.

The movie Track Down was created based in 2000 on this one-sided account of the events of Mitnick's persuit and capture in 1995. Although not entirely factual the movie is pretty entertaining anyway, I bought the DVD.

This book covers three different "hackers" (more acurately, "crackers"), and their exploits. I read it while working 2nd shift in the NOC at Goodnet, a broadband carrier and dial-up Isp at the time in Phoenix, Arizona.

The first section deals with Kevin Mitnick, once occupying a spot on the FBI's Most Wanted list. Our Federal geniuses kept him in solitary confinement because they thought he could whistle into a phone and launch nukes. Yes, it's true. Our Federal servants are just that stupid.

The second section covers the exploits of a lesser known German cracker named "Pengo".

Robert Tappan Morris, aka "RTM", is covered in the third section. He became famous in for unleashing a "worm" on the ARPAnet (early Internet) that ended up taking down a huge amount of computers and hosts on the network.

I started reading this book, the free online version, back in late 1997 during my short (3 month) tenure at Inficad Computing & Design in between tech support calls. I enjoyed it, so I purchased the book and finished reading it the old fashioned way in dead tree form. Trying things for free is cool, but if you enjoy something it's cool to compensate the creator.

Another cool thing about this book was that it covered Operation Sundevil which happened in Arizona in 1990. Since I was living in Phoenix at the time I read this, and at the time of Operation Sundevil, and my old man worked for AT&T and the Bell System most of his working life, it made it all the more interesting.

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