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1/ Nominally a biography of J.C.R. Licklider, The Dream Machine is a history of the personal computer and internet. A running thread summary amzn.to/2M6vzpv 
2/ J.C.R. Licklider “Lick” was born in Missouri but quickly found his way to Boston, first at Harvard, then at MIT which was becoming the central hub for the nascent computing research.
3/ He was preceded at MIT by Vannevar Bush who joined the Department of Electrical Engineering at MIT in 1919, and founded the company now known as Raytheon in 1922.
4/ Computing was looked down on myathematicians and scientists at MIT because it was seen as "just arithmetic" and "pink collar women's work."
5/ First computers were analog, physical rods and poles represented states that had to be moved around assembled. The machine t MIT was impressive in that it could do what would have taken weeks for physical computers to do but could still take days to assemble
6/ Vannevar Bush got a grant from Rockefellers to build an electronic computer that could be programmed more quickly. It was widely derided but ended up being used extensively by US military in WW2
7/ In 1939, Vammevar Bush published an article in Fortune that imagining a "desk library" which would be built using microfilm. Entries in the library would be organized not by alphabetical order but by “links” of signs in the microfilm relating similar topics.
8/ He gave the example of an article on the English longbow being linked to one on the Turkish Longbow through a sign imprinted on the microfilm"
