Sunburst and Luminary by Don Eyles has a lot of the kind of color that helps the reader understand what was going on technologically during the 1960s. For example, there is this poem about integrated circuits (you don’t get to use “poem” and “integrated circuits” in the same sentence very often):
The transistor’s a marvelous invention
Replaced the tube convention
Found its niche
To amplify or switch
Whatever the designer’s intention.
But the breakthrough was the IC
Integrated monolithically
It became pivotal
As computers went digital
With increasing complexity.
Eyles tells us that this poem was written by hardware designer Jayne Partridge, and appears in Eldon Hall’s write-up of the Apollo Guidance Computer and the decision to use ICs in it:
I love limericks and making them up. Here’s another one: There once was a man from Nantucket Who put too much power in circuit His plate glowed red and his batt’ry went dead And he threw it all in a bucket. So there it lay in the bucket The tube and the wires and what not And he stormed and he fumed ‘Til his anger consumed and he said, “If I could I’d take all and just chuck it. But hearing it all came his sister Who said, “you need bigger resistor” Either that or I’d reckon you ought to now beckon That guy with the fancy transistor.