Dealers of Lightning (1999)

Michael Hiltzik chronicles the extraordinary gathering of visionary engineers at Xerox PARC who essentially invented personal computing, from graphical interfaces and Ethernet to laser printing. The narrative lays bare the tragic corporate friction between Palo Alto's technical pioneers and Xerox executives in New York, who fundamentally failed to commercialise these radical creations. It remains an indispensable study of how unmatched corporate research and development transformed computing architecture whilst slipping through the hands of its benefactors.