Second this recommendation. 

Ornstein’s contemporaneous thoughts about the ARPANET project he worked on, paraphrased: “Why in the world would anyone ever want to network computers?”

Paul

On Sep 5, 2020, at 03:27, David Walden <dave.walden.family@gmail.com> wrote:

Severo Ornstein's memoir "Computing in the Middle Ages -- A view from the trenches, 1955-1983".

Available publicly at the Computer History Museum.
https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102785079

His journey goes from Whirlwind to TX-2 to LINC to ARPANET to Durado to Mockingbird.  At least look at the annotated Table of Contents and read the Preface to see what you'd be missing to not read his well written story.

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________________________
William J. Perry Fellow in International Security and Senior Research Scholar
Stanford University

Professor of Information and History (Emeritus)
University of Michigan