What good biographies about people in IT are there?

Question

What good biographies about people in IT are out there?

I am thinking about people like Bill Gates, Linus ThorvaldsTorvalds, Steve Jobs etc.

I find biographies to be very inspiring, and I have read a lot of them - but not about people in IT.

Biographies

• Linus Torvalds - Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary
• Steve Wozniak - iWoz
• Steve Jobs - iCon
• Nikola Tesla - My Inventions: The Autobiography of Nikola Tesla
• Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists

Other books

• The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage
• Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days (Recipes: a Problem-Solution Ap)
• The Soul Of A New Machine
• Fire in the Valley: The Making of The Personal Computer
• Alan Turing: The Enigma
• The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine
• Hackers by Steven Levy
• A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi
• Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft
• Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM

Documentaries/videos

• Triumph of the Nerds
• Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Answer 1

I once found it interesting to read Big Blues: The Unmaking of IBM, about IBM and the start of the PC industry. It's not a biography about any one specific person, but similar (about history and people).

Answer 2

This is a great book about Linus Torvalds: Just for Fun: The Story of an Accidental Revolutionary

Answer 3

See the biographies in wikipedia e.g: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:People_in_information_technology , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Computer_pioneers , etc...

Answer 4

Okay so it's a TV program, but I found Triumph of the Nerds to be very interesting.

Answer 5

Soul of a new machine

Fire in the valley

There is also some interesting stuff in "Founders at work" - most interesting to me is the contrast between bright people like the RIM guys, Adobe guys and Woz on one hand and the lucky web startups that just made money by being in the right place on the other. Some of those guys shouldn't even be in the same book.

I'd recommend the first two, but not sure I would recommend spending for the founders at work.

Cuckoo's egg is a pretty good read.

I found the biography of Nicola Tesla to be amazing as well.

Answer 6

iWoz - Steve Wozniak

iCon Steve Jobs

Answer 7

I enjoyed Alan Turing: The Enigma.

Answer 8

Not quite a biography but a lot more: The Annotated Turing

Answer 9

A video not a book, autobiography, a C.S. professor (not I.T.): Randy Pausch Last Lecture: Achieving Your Childhood Dreams

Answer 10

Also not quite a biography, rather a string of parts of biographies that make up an epic story: "Hackers" by Steven Levy. On the same vein, "A History of Modern Computing" by Paul Ceruzzi.

Answer 11

Out of Their Minds: The Lives and Discoveries of 15 Great Computer Scientists, includes Backus, McCarthy, Dijkstra, Knuth, Tarja, Lamport, Kay and 8 more famous names: a chapter on each so not full biographies but a useful introduction to each one.

Answer 12

Show Stopper!: The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft by G. Pascal Zachary is a great read. It's a biography of Windows NT, but contains mini bios on Dave Cutler and many of his development team members and their families.

Answer 13

short biogs of woz and jobs

Answer 14

It's not out quite yet but I'm looking forward to Coders at Work by Peter Seibel.

Answer 15

Not exactly a person's biography, but rather Logic's (and IMHO Computer Science's) biography. It's worth the time. logicomix