The Soul of a New Machine:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Soul_of_a_New_Machine

The Dream Machine by M. Mitchell Waldrop [1]. An in-depth history of how personal computing was created.

[1] https://press.stripe.com/the-dream-machine

“South: The Story of Shackleton’s Last Expedition, 1914–1917” by Sir Ernest Shackleton. Here, Shackleton documents the journey of the Endurance expedition, which aimed to traverse Antarctica but instead became a legendary tale of survival after the ship was trapped and destroyed by pack ice.

Exactly: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World http://www.simonwinchester.com/exactly

Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longitude_(book)

Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War - https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/38840.Boyd

> Less interested in people and character studies.

If you don’t want examples then all you need to know is velocity. The Y Combinator people call it doing things that don’t scale. Here is how it works for absolutely anything:

1. Get the right tools in place. This is an intrinsic capability set you have to build. People tend to fail here most frequently and hope some framework or copy/paste of a library will just do it for them. Don’t be some worthless pretender. Know your shit from experience so you can execute with confidence.

2. Build a solid foundation. This will require a lot of trial and error plus several rounds of refactoring because you need some idea of the edge cases and where you the pain points are. You will know it when you have it because it’s highly durable and requires less of everything compared to the alternatives. A solid foundation isn’t a thing you sell. It’s your baseline for doing everything else at low cost.

3. Create tests. These should be in writing but they don’t have to be. You need a list of known successes and failures ready to apply at everything new. There are a lot of whiners that are quick to cry about how something can’t be done. Fuck those guys and instead try it to know exactly what more it takes to get done.

4. Finally, measure things. It is absolutely astonishing that most people cannot do this at all. It looks amazing when you see it done well and this is ultimately what separates the adults from the children. This is where velocity comes from because you will know exactly how much faster you are compared to where you were. If you aren’t intimately aware of your performance in numbers from a variety of perspectives you aren’t more special than anyone else.

People who accomplish hard things are capable of doing those because they didn’t get stuck. They had the proper tools in place to manipulate their environment, redefine execution (foundation), objectively determine what works without guessing, and then know how much to tweak it moving forward.

Masters of Doom is quite good about John Carmack and the creation of id Software.

Richard Hamming's book on AT&T Bell Labs R&D culture in inventing and solving many of the important problems [1].

Another is Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner on the early days of the Internet [2].

[1] The Art of Doing Science and Engineering:

https://press.stripe.com/the-art-of-doing-science-and-engine...

[2] Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins Of The Internet:

https://katiehafner.com/books-new/where-wizards-stay-up-late...

You might want to look into books about H. Tracy Hall. He's one of the inventors of lab-grown diamonds, the hardest things ever done.

I read these three books last year and I believe that each would be interesting to you:

Undaunted Courage https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undaunted_Courage

This is about doing something extremely hard with a huge amount of unknowns, and the type of person it takes to succeed.

How Big Things Get Done https://www.amazon.com/How-Big-Things-Get-Done/dp/0593239512

This is about project planning and has plenty of real examples and case studies.

The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon https://www.thepsmiths.com/p/review-the-education-of-cyrus-b...

This is the best book on leadership and teamwork that I've ever read. You can read this review instead but get a copy of the actual book, too, it's wonderful.

The Wright Brothers biography was incredible. Highly recommend for the exact qualities you're looking for:

  the mechanics of how things that we take for granted actually got built and what the world they were made in was like

I haven't personally read it, but The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes seems to fit the bill.

> hard things

How about consistently competing at fighting video-games at the highest level in the world for more than 30 years?

"The Will to Keep Winning", by Daigo Umehara. He was the first Street Fighter 2 player to reach the top (being considered either the best player or top 3), and he was able to stay at the stop since then. No other video-game player has ever been so consistently good as Daigo. He may not have won many EVO or Capcom Cup titles, but he has always stayed at the top. And he's the protagonist of Evo Moment 37.

Also, his story is good. The book may make you cry. And it's a very short book.

I greatly enjoyed The Leadership Moment by Michael Useem, which covers 9 stories of crises and how leaders approached them.

The Man Who Discovered Quality by Andrea Gabor is an interesting story of W. Edwards Deming, the American who revolutionized post-WWII Japanese manufacturing with statistical approaches to reducing variance.

Issac Newton by James Gleick conveys what it was like for Newton to essentially invent modern physical science in a pre-scientific world.

Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg is a good counterpoint to inspiring tech origin stories: legendary coders coming together to build an amazing product and… basically failing.

House on Fire: The Fight to Eradicate Smallpox

In House on Fire, William H. Foege describes his own experiences in public health and details the remarkable program that involved people from countries around the world in pursuit of a single objective―eliminating smallpox forever.

Digital Apollo by David A. Mindell. An excellent book that describes how the Apollo computer was developed.

Dealers of Lighting Xerox Parc and the dawn of computer age by Michael A. Hiltzik. If you're interested in knowing where the PC as we know it today originated from.

Others have already suggested The Dream Machine which was a book that once started I couldn't stop reading and finished it in about a week.

Edit: Maybe not exactly the book that you might be interested in but I read Mindstorms by Papert and I think his work on education through the use of computers was groundbreaking. Very interesting book.

Newton and the Counterfeiter

https://www.royalmint.com/shop/books/Newton-and-the-Counterf...

Excellent book about Isaac Newton's role in solving the great recoinage crisis.

Copies in Seconds: Chester Carlson and the Birth of the Xerox Machine by David Owen

"A history of the photocopier offers a portrait of reserved physics graduate Chester Carlson, who invented the copier to ease his job as a patent clerk and who saw his marketing efforts daunted by numerous rejections, before the head of Xerox research recognized the machine's potential. "

Janna Levin, Black Hole Blues and Other Songs from Outer Space. It describes the construction of the LIGO experiment over a span of about 50 years. It does have a lot of character studies (one of Levin’s strengths) but also plenty of details about the incredible equipment and what it took to design it and put it all together.

Empires of Light by Jill Jonnes does a great job covering the rivalry between Edison, Tesla, and Westinghouse over electrifying the world. I liked how it broke down the technical and business challenges and showed the impact on everyday life and industry.

Freedom's Forge

You might like Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days. It’s written by Jessica Livingston, who founded Y Combinator.

The Innovators, Walter Isaacson

It’s interesting to read how many individuals contributed in all sorts of important ways in the history of computing.

I rather liked 'The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation'

The Perfectionists: How Precision Engineers Created the Modern World by Simon Winchester

Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson

dava sobel's "longitude" is excellent

"Liftoff: Elon Musk and the Desperate Early Days That Launched SpaceX" by Eric Berger documents how SpaceX employees poured their blood, sweat, and tears into launching a cost-effective rocket at a time when legacy operators dominated the space market with their costly cost-plus-fee contracts. This book mostly follows the journey of employees and (thankfully) doesn't resolve to Elon praise too much. There is a continuation to this book called "Reentry" but I haven't read it yet.

Re: getting hard things done I've been admiring the way Elon Musk takes calculated risks in:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk_(Isaacson_book)

Vaccinated: One Man's Quest to Defeat the World's Deadliest Diseases

Describes how Maurice Hilleman invented 40 vaccines, including for eight of the most common diseases in the US, over a 36 year career at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center and Merck & Co. His vaccines are estimated to save 8 million lives each year.

You can find documentaries also on youtube, for example. There was one interesting about Dubai's development

how to get rich by felix dennis is a banger for me