I have always been a history enthusiast. Unfortunately, I don’t know much about history in the context of computers. I am therefore interested in learning more about significant events and people like Richard stallman and all the related events such as Windows refund day. I am interested to read and explore the timeline, I suppose a book would be ideal but any good resource such as a youtube series would be great too.
Update: I am happy to recieve such wide variety of resources to explore, I hope this post might help someone who is interested in FOSS history in the future too.
I can recommend the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution, which I’ve read multiple times. I can also recommend Linus’ autobiography Just For Fun.
You can also consider The Cathedral and the Bazaar… though ESR can be a bit much.
That said, here are some random articles I’ve saved that you might be interested in:
Cuckoo’s Egg is a hacker true-crime from the 80s. Sorry no link. Lunch break.
Can also recommend Just For Fun - that Finnish sense of humour doesn’t come across well, and while he’s good with English he certainly isn’t Shakespeare, but it does fly by.
History of Linux, abridged: Linus was using Minix on his own PC while at University, but was a bit fed up with its networking capabilities, so he’d written a toy operating system for a couple of his classes. While experimenting with adding features to it, he deleted his Minix partition by accident. Might as well continue with the one he’d written, since it was almost capable enough to be a daily driver. Publish the source, get a few collaborators in to add in the features that they found most useful, repeat. Boom.
There were some good pieces on Groklaw back in the day about the history of unix and Linux.