The other books on hardware from this timeframe such as Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ or Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ or Andy Hertzfeld's _Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made_ (available as: https://folklore.org/0-index.html) are quite striking and forthright in their discussion of hardware limitations and the ingenuity needed to get things done.
Or, contrast the far more prosaic _Weaving the Web_ by Tim Berners-Lee and esp. take note of compromises such as URL changing from Universal Resource Locator to Uniform Resource Locator.
The other books on hardware from this timeframe such as Tracy Kidder's _The Soul of a New Machine_ or Jerry Kaplan's _StartUp_ or Andy Hertzfeld's _Revolution in The Valley: The Insanely Great Story of How the Mac Was Made_ (available as: https://folklore.org/0-index.html) are quite striking and forthright in their discussion of hardware limitations and the ingenuity needed to get things done.
The book _CAD History_, available on-line at: https://www.shapr3d.com/history-of-cad/introduction has a bit on Xanadu from the Autodesk end of things.
Or, contrast the far more prosaic _Weaving the Web_ by Tim Berners-Lee and esp. take note of compromises such as URL changing from Universal Resource Locator to Uniform Resource Locator.
I really like the analogy of “pinball” from _The Soul of a New Machine_. It matches my imagination of good engineers perfectly.