Do you read enough?
I don’t mean the Old Testament, James Joyce or Marcel Proust. I mean: Do you read anything about technology that has a shelf life of longer than 20 minutes?
Earlier this year, eager to solidify my grounding, I reread five books about the world of technology that had inspired me in the past. I found that they all had much to offer on a second read, and I’d like to share them with you.
– Tracy Kidder’s “The Soul of a New Machine,” recently reissued by the Modern Library (336 pages, $17.95), with a new introduction by the author, is a model of what a nonfiction business or technology book should do. It narrows its focus on one project, the creation of a minicomputer at Data General in the late 1970s, and keeps burrowing deeper and deeper to tell why the project was necessary, how the project proceeded, how the people sucked into the project changed and whether all this is such a good idea. Long before the term “Internet time” gained popularity, Kidder chronicled the nerve-breaking schedules that created this industry.
– Bruce Tognazzini became famous within the computer industry as an Apple Computer user-interface guru. “Tog on Interface” (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 331 pages, $29.95), a compilation of his insightful columns, has a lot to teach developers about how their products help–or hurt–their audience. Best of all, although “Tog” is a big Apple fan, he’s willing to see shortcomings in his company’s interfaces. Those who enjoy this well-balanced examination may also wish to read the semi-sequel “Tog on Software Design,” (Addison-Wesley Publishing Co., 407 pages, $29.95).
– Jay David Bolter’s “The Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext and the History of Writing” (Lawrence Erlbaum Assoc., 258 pages, $34.50) and Janet H. Murray’s “Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace” (MIT Press, 324 pages, $15) are a pair of books that take on the question
“What might cyberwriting become” with intelligence, humor, and citations more wide-ranging than you’d expect to read in 10 books. Bolter got there first and he even prepared a pre-Web hypertext version of his tome; Murray looks to Shakespeare and Zork, among many others, for examples of how we might better tell stories on the screen.
– And of course where would we be without Dilbert? Scott Adams’s cubicle creation tells the story of our digital lives more rigorously and far more hilariously than most. If you haven’t read any of his books, “The Dilbert Principle: A Cubicle’s-Eye View of Bosses, Meetings, Management Fads & Other Workplace Afflictions,” (Harperbusiness, 352 pages, $15.40) is not only his best collection of cartoons but also an ambitious attempt at squeezing his three-frame insights into a broader narrative context.
If you haven’t read these books, you should. If you have, go back and learn some more. Now start reading.
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Are there any high-tech books that inspire you? (views@vineyard.com)Let us know.
