some places to check (Score 1)

Here's another vote for Cringely's Accidental Empires. I'ld also suggest Tracy Kidder's Soul Of A New Machine. Gotta say, though, as many posts have commented, if you want stuff on the history of OSes, then look online. The RTFM and FAQ archives at Stanford (forget not the ancient days of SAIL my son), MIT, and CMU have served me well. Remember that a lot of key work was done at corporations that are very happy to document their eminent histories. for Xerox PARC, check out www.parc.xerox.com/parc-go.html For Bell Labs check out www.bell-labs.com/ Also remember that the Patent Office http://www.uspto.gov/patft/index.html isn't a bad place to go for the paper trail (e-bay and suchlike notwithstanding). Go to http://164.195.100.11/netahtml/search-bool.html and type Tevanian in Inventor name and you'll never doubt the origins of microkernel OSes again. Last but not least, if you really want to understand where OSes came from then check out some of the failures. Find somebody who ran an academic system in the mid-eighties and ask them about VMS and the legendary dumping of the DEC Rainbow. You'll never really have a feel for why open standards are so important until you've felt the pain of, for example "85% DOS compatable" early PC clones. Check out the stuff the corporations aren't so proud of, like Exxon's attempt to become a computer company or the "Oh, it's be fine" compromises of the IBM Peanut and the Apple III (not II, III). And just in case you briefly forget that most pundits and in fact IT departments have consistently grossly misread the future of this business, think of this: it wasn't too many years ago that Richard Stallman and GNU could be seen at computer shows with a tiny little set of tables in the midst of vast wealth being blown off while "real" concerns, like "When will Chicago come out?" and "Isn't it wonderful that Unix is finally in safe hands at Novell" dominated the floor. Good luck and remember to always post your results somewhere just as public as where you posted the questions. -Rustin