Anytime I see anything names my-asm or mini.asm or anything like that, it instantly yanks me back to college. We had this awesome teacher who had been at DEC for decades and taught at night. He'd bring in chunks of core memory, and tell us all about the old days in between course work. God I loved that class.
I'm reading Hackers by Stephen Levy right now and DEC's pdp computer era as described seems like a real golden age. I'd enjoy more history book recommendations along this line if anyone knows of some
Specifically about British computing is Electronic Dreams (Tom Lean) (disclosure: I went to university with the author).
The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer (Doron Swade) is also an interesting read, especially as Babbage's ideas were eventually vindicated when the Science Museum built it in the 1990s and it worked.
