Excited to see Ian Foster ("a native of New Zealand") mentioned on the last page ( )

For someone who has been programming computers since they were 12, this book was a great find as it chronicled the bit of history that isn't old enough to make it's way into computer science textbooks but is also not young enough to appear in the general media. It was great to read about the early days of compilers (it was originally though that a person would always be able to optimise better than a computer could) and that the predecessor of Word was called Bravo and Java was originally called Oak (because there was a big oak tree outside the office where Java was developed). A great read to for those interested in programming history to be sure!

From the back cover - Go To chronicles the untold history of software and its maverick creators. Drawing upon original reporting and interviews, Steve Lohr gives us an intimate portrait of the peculiar kind of genius that has always been drawn to this unique blend of art, science, and engineering - imaginative originals like Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie, whose all-night stints gave rise to the Unix operating system and the C programming language that loosened the grip of IBM; Charles Simonyi, whose childhood as an Erector-set fanatic in Communist Hungary led to his becoming the emigre architect of the spectacularly successful Word software; and James Gosling, whose dream of 'virtual code' that could run on any machine, became Java, the Internet programming language. ( )