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Computers and the World of the Future (https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/computers-and-world-future) is a highly recommended read. It's not a "history" text per-se, but rather, it is a transcript of a number of talks (and the resulting discussions) given by the then-stalwarts of computing in 1961. It's a fascinating account of the what these people thought about the direction in which computing was taking. John McCarthy, for example, talked about the "utility computing":

"We can envisage computing service companies whose subscribers are connected to them by telephone lines. Each subscriber needs to pay only for the capacity he actually uses, but he has access to all programming languages characteristic of a very large system."




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