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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________________________

Paul N. Edwards

Director, Program on Science, Technology & Society

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

Center for International Security and Cooperation

Co-Director, Stanford Existential Risks Initiative

Stanford University

Professor of Information and History (Emeritus)

University of Michigan

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This email is relayed from members at sigcis.org, the email discussion list of SHOT SIGCIS. Opinions expressed here are those of the member posting and are not reviewed, edited, or endorsed by SIGCIS. The list archives are at http://lists.sigcis.org/pipermail/members-sigcis.org/ and you can change your subscription options at http://lists.sigcis.org/listinfo.cgi/members-sigcis.org