catch up on my reading list.

I might be an engineer, but I’m also interested in how engineers work, and in San Francisco area history. I got this book after a Google search of a old company turned up stories of how Silicon Valley really got started back in the 1930’s by companies doing souped-up vacuum tubes for amateur radio operators. All the craziness we think of in Silicon Valley – engineers jumping between companies at the drop of a hat, odd family-like perks (like HP’s summer camp in the redwoods), crazy hours by engineers trying to figure out the next big thing – have been around forever.

It also highlighted how a lot of the high-tech companies were founded by engineers who’d moved back east, hated, and moved back. (I’m not the only one!) Now I understand what all those companies along the Bayshore Freeway were doing when I was a kid.

When I was in Leipzig, Germany, I visited the Stasi (secret police museum). It was in the old headquarters building, and looked much as it did after the Wall fell when the angry East Germans swarmed the place after realizing that the Stasi were burning all the secret files . Most of the museum consisted of display boards dating from an informal display of what folks found in the first few days. Unfortunately, most of it was in German, and the only English guide had only a sentence on each room.

I wanted to learn more about East Germany and the Stasi; I found a couple books in Berlin, but “The File” was one of the books I read about on the Net that sounded interesting.

It’s definitely a good read. The author, an English academic, lived in East Germany in the ‘80’s but got banned from the country after he published a couple critical articles in the West German press. He writes about what he found when he looked in his secret police file, and tries to remember the events that his watchers had observed and recorded. It’s a nice description of what East Germany used to be like, how the Stasi acted, and a reminder of how fragile our memory of the past can be.