February 29, 2008

Programmers at Work Revisited

Susan Lammers's Programmers at Work is one of my all-time favourite books of any kind. It's basically a series of interviews with the pioneers of the personal computing industry, from Charles Simonyi to Bill Gates and Bob Carr and Andy Hertzfeld. It was published way back in 1984 and has been pretty hard to find since then. I still have my copy and treasure it immensely.

If you're jealous of my good fortune, you no longer have to be. As a way of gaging interest for a follow up volume, Lammers has begun posting the old interviews on a blog, starting with Charles Simonyi.

I personally would love to see a similar volume featuring today's pioneers.

For those that are interested, it's worth noting that Out of their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists by Dennis Shasha and Cathy Lazere is similar in intention to Lammers's book and also very, very good. via Wordyard.

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