How I’ve Benefitted From Reading Technology History

Earlier this year I read Masters of Doom, a phenomenal book about the creation of Doom, one of the most influential video games ever. The book is wildly entertaining, and it presents countless lessons about building great technology that has stuck with me ever since.

I never played Doom — I was too young — but since reading it, I’ve asked many people what they remember of the game. I’ve never seen anything create such an immediate sense of nostalgia.

Slava Akmechet captures it well:

You didn’t even need to play to know that computer history was just delineated into before and after. As soon as you saw the artwork of the game menu, you knew. Doom changed me in a profound way. I used to never think about computers or programming. It was just something I loved to do more than anything else. But a few seconds of Doom gameplay permanently flipped a bit in my brain. It made me aware that programming computers is what I want to be doing for the rest of my life.

How many kids went on to become engineers and leaders at places like SpaceX, Apple or any other company shaping our culture, because of that game?

Stories like this have given me an appreciation for how delicate our world is. It’s a strange thing to realise that nothing about the world we live in was inevitable. The things we take as guarantees — education, electricity, communication — are human inventions that sprang out of the minds of people like you and me. Our…