There's a brief review of "Digital Retro: The Evolution and Design of the
Personal Computer" by the British author Gordon Laing (Sybex, 2004) here:
http://www.itbusiness.ca/index.asp?theaction=61&sid=57868#
From the review: "If you look at today?s boring
beige boxes, or the sleek
design of the Mac, it?s hard to believe that personal
computers once had
personality. Where homogeneity is now the norm, 20 years ago everyone
marched to his own drummer, producing machines that looked, felt and worked
differently, and whose data and software was totally incompatible. Digital
Retro: The Evolution and Design of the Personal Computer, by Gordon Laing,
celebrates those pioneering days in words and pictures, telling the tales of
44 early machines ranging from the MITS Altair to the NeXT Cube."
Arlen Michaels