Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs (2011)

Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing.

At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, and when societies around the world are trying to build digital-age economies, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in the twenty-first century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering.

Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted.

Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values.

Publisher Simon & Schuster, 2011
ISBN 1451648553, 9781451648553
656 pages

review (Evgeny Morozov, The New Republic)
review (Sam Leith, Guardian)
review (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)
review (Adam Satariano and Peter Burrows, Bloomberg)
review (Huffington Post)

Publisher

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
EPUB (updated on 2012-7-25)

Edwin Black: IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America’s Most Powerful Corporation, 2nd ed. (2001/2002)

Published to extraordinary praise, this provocative international bestseller details the story of IBM’s strategic alliance with Nazi Germany. IBM and the Holocaust provides a chilling investigation into corporate complicity, and the atrocities witnessed raise startling questions that throw IBM’s wartime ethics into serious doubt. Edwin Black’s monumental research exposes how IBM and its subsidiaries helped create enablling technologies for the Nazis, step-by-step, from the identification and cataloging programs of the 1930s to the selections of the 1940s.

Publisher Dialog Press, 2001
Second edition published in 2002
ISBN 0914153102, 9780914153108
551 pages

review (Michael Hirsh, Newsweek)
review (Christopher Simpson, Washington Post)
review (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times)
review (Jack Beatty, The Atlantic)

reponse from IBM, addendum

author
wikipedia
google books

PDF (updated on 2012-7-25)
PDF (EPUB; added on 2012-7-25)

Ernst Martin: The Calculating Machines (Die Rechenmaschinen): Their History and Development (1925/1992)

This final volume in the Charles Babbage Institute Reprint series brings to light an extremely rare German account of the calculating machine industry in the first quarter of this century when the use of office machines became common in American and European business, government, and science.

Ernst Martin wrote Die Rechenmaschinen to address the issues and questions that the public had raised about the many calculating devices that were appearing on the market in the early 1920s. His little book is, in fact, a developmental history of calculating machines in catalog form – invaluable for collectors of old machines. The introduction describes the seven major types of machines that had been produced by 1925. The corpus of the book consists of a running list of specific calculating machines, arranged by the date the device was first patented or produced.

Stephan Weiss maintains a list of comments and corrections of the book.

Originally published in German as Die Rechenmaschinen und ihre Entwicklungsgeschichte by Johannes Meyer, Pappenheim, 1925.
Translated and edited by Peggy Aldrich Kidwell and Michael R. Williams
Publisher MIT Press, 1992
Volume 16 of The Charles Babbage Institute reprint series for the history of computing
ISBN 0262132788, 9780262132787
367 pages

publisher
google books
via rechenmaschinen-illustrated.com

PDF
View online (web version; includes machines made after 1925; maintained by Herbert Schneemann and Walter Szrek)