The greatest guide to how technology becomes business – from one of the tech industry’s greatest managers. He offers fine analysis right up to the Microsoft anti-trust cases at the turn of the 21st century.

Opening with a charming description of a typical day that traces his interactions with software (on the computer, making coffee, at the ATM), Campbell-Kelly next takes the reader back to software’s birth in a 1950s airline reservation system. Campbell-Kelly’s book traces the history of this industry. Amazon, Google, Twitter, and Facebook are software operations, as are more than half of the new companies that get venture capital funding these days. From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog by Martin Campbell-Kelly When looking forward, I am wary of so-called futurists, so I turn to fiction.ġ.

The historical books share a common theme: there is no single company, technology, or person that deserves credit for an invention or successful launch. My new book, Troublemakers: How a Generation of Silicon Valley Upstarts Invented the Future, chronicles how the narrow strip of peninsula south of San Francisco transformed itself from an obscure region with a single technology at its core to the birthplace of five major industries: personal computing, video games, modern venture capital, biotechnology and the advanced semiconductor logic that has been so essential to the rise of today’s technologies.īelow are eight of my favourite books that shed light on how American technology got where it is – and two that offer a glimpse of where we might be heading. Unlike Europe and the UK, the US is only now beginning to wrestle in a serious way with issues of privacy, monopoly, pay parity among the sexes, and free speech.Īs a historian of Silicon Valley, I know from decades of research that these problems, as well as the great successes they shadow, have long been in the mix.

Some two billion people – more than a quarter of the global population – actively use Facebook every month. Five of the most valuable public companies on the planet (Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Microsoft) are American tech firms. U S high-technology seems to be overwhelming the world right now, for good and ill.

The dream machine waldrop