Tools for Thought

Rheingold wrote the history of personal computing while it was still happening, interviewing Engelbart, Kay, Licklider, and others who had built it. The book traces the intellectual lineage from Babbage and Boole through Bush's Memex to the Xerox PARC researchers who invented the graphical interface, treating computing not as an industry but as a long project to augment human thought. What makes it unusual is Rheingold's access — he talked to these people before they became legends, when the story had not yet been polished into myth. The revised 2000 edition, which Rheingold made freely available online, adds context that the original could not have had. It remains the best single narrative of how computing became personal and why that mattered more than making it fast.