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How We Got Here - Stuff To Read

Posted by Hemos on from the things-for-your-brane dept.

A reader writes:"Ever wonder why Michael Faraday, steam engines, Ezra Cornell, the Van de Beurses family and the Edison Effect were so important to today's computer business. Andy Kessler has a free download of a PDF of his new book, How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets. It's a James Burke-style connect-the-dots of events and people from 1642 to this morning. Kessler's site takes you through a "poor man's DRM" process to get your very own PDF." Yeah, yeah - DRM. But the PDF/book is worth reading for understanding the history to tech. Speaking of good things to read, I also read this little ditty Not Proud, which was good. It's stuff from NotProud.com collected in dead tree form.

2 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. GNAA IS FIRST by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    NIGS4LYFE

  2. MOD PARENT DOWN by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    '''Michael Everson''' is an non-notable UNICODE developer and is one of the most vain and pretentious persons in the world. He created a wikipedia page about himself and is its sole contributor. If one is to judge by the WP entry he is the most beautiful and smart guy, but if you saw him in real life like I did you would soon notice that he's just a little, insecure [[homo|homosexual]] who desperately craves for e-fame.

    Having talked to his one of his previous employers (he has had many) I was told that Michael was fired for sexual harrassment and that beyond knowing the UTF-16 code for nearly all the world's written characters he is really dumb, having absolutely no critical thinking skills and is unable to add two-digit numbers in his head. Michael's dream is to finally comprehend binary and hexdecimal so he can tell you the character codes in them.

    It is said that Everson has the personality of a 12 year old boy. He gets excited by the smallest of things and has absolutely no ability to understand complex social conventions, such as washing his hands after going to the toilet. Everson was once seen playing with his own excrement at an [http://www.iec.org/ IEC] conference. He just grabbed a piece of poo that came out of his AIDS-ridden hole and smeared it all over the table, making the other participants leave in disgust. This is said to have set-back the development of UNICODE for several decades, as some people swore to never implement support in theirs operating systems until Everson has put in a mental institution.