Non-fiction books that end just before Everything Changed

Cafe Society
1

I’m reading Tracy Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine, about a team at Data General, the scrappiest builder of minicomputers, designing their first 32-bit mini. Published in 1982, I assume the book ends around 1980, when the computer system in question, the Eclipse MV/8000, was released, or 1981 to show some of the reaction to it. You may remember 1981 as the year the IBM PC Model 5150 was released, changing everything in office computing and starting the mini’s long slide to irrelevance. Data General tried to adapt, but never caught fire.

Some months ago I read Steven Levy’s Hackers. While many of the featured players are still guiding the computer business, it ends in early 1984, shortly before The Superbowl Ad that changed [del]everything[/del] a lot of stuff.

What other books have, when they were released, described a current reality that would change before the first edition was published, making the book a quaint artefact of a bygone age?

2

Back in the mid-90’s I read a book about the history of the Internet. The book was only a few years old, but already grossly outdated.

What I remember most was, amidst all the chapters about gopher, FTP, IRC & Usenet, was a single page describing a brand new, experimental protocol known as HTTP.

3

I have a couple of physics textbooks that were published in 1904. One has a brief mention of the Michelson-Morley Experiment, without any mention of the results or implications, and the other has no mention of anything relating to relativity at all.

4

Scott Adams - “The Dilbert Future” - 1997
He makes a bunch of predictions. The one that sticks out in my head the most is he thought that ISDN would beat out cable internet.