Tuesday, May 03, 2005

How We Got Here: a Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and the Markets This free pdf book from Pragmatic Books is by Andy Kessler. Covering technology and the markets in 200 plus pages, from Pascal to Google, is a fast read; the book is worth examining.   The author tries to answer the following questions: "What is the history of the computer industry? Of the communications industry? Of the Internet? Why does the U.S. dominate these businesses? Didn’t the British rule the last big cycle? What happened to them? Why do we have money? What is it backed by? What was the gold standard all about? Do we still have a gold standard? How did the stock market come into being and what is it for? Aren’t banks good enough? Who wins – money or ideas? Does the military get its technology from industry or the other way around? Did anything besides Velcro and Tang come out of the Space Program? Why does the U.S. have any industrial businesses left?" Thanks to Slashdot for the reference (http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/05/02/1128225&;from=rss). ___JH   3:39:12 PM    COMMENT []