The history of personal computers is something you can find covered in all manner of media. It’s beyond a cult following and well into mythmaking. What’s often lost is that there’s a history of computing that reaches much further into the past; most histories treat anything before minicomputers (and, increasingly minicomputers themselves) as a given and tell the story of the PC. But the minicomputer era relied on prior art, and this is what we hear about in IBM.
If you ever wanted to know how hard disc drives or magnetic tape were invented or how early architecture was worked out this textbook is actually a treasure trove.
From my perspective the most interesting section is of course the chapter on Programming featuring early assembly (etymology: related to the fact that they were writing programs for the so called “Test Assembly?”) and ‘speed code’, stuff that predates the history of programming languages as such.
