This is a good companion to read after Crystal Fire [1] that covers the discovery of the transistor and the backgrounds of Bardeen, Brattain and Shockley in a similar fashion. I had hoped that book would cover Noyce, but it did not, and this article fills that void nicely.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Fire-Transistor-Information-T...

The idea of the transistor was patented in 1926, but it took all the hard work of making a transistor by the Bell Labs team for discrete transistors to become a reality.

See [1] for an excellent summary of the birth of the transistor.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Crystal-Fire-Transistor-Information-Te...

The most authoritative work is Ceruzzi's A History of Modern Computing (http://amzn.to/1TiHgqd). Because it's written by an academic, not a journalist, it also has a great bibliography and footnotes. Some of the works it cites that are very valuable in themselves, depending on your area of interest, are:

- R. Hodeson, Crystal Fire (on the invention of the transistor), http://amzn.to/1RictfF

- T.R. Reid, The Chip (on the IC), http://amzn.to/1Hdbu8w

- E.W. Pugh, IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems, (on the evolution of computer architecture), http://amzn.to/1NKZcWQ

Also, as others have mentioned, Soul of a New Machine is awesome.

I feel like you may be asking about computer science, though, not computer hardware. If so, pickings are slim. Two that stand out are:

- S. Rosenberg, Dreaming in Code, http://amzn.to/1HdbJk1 (Not really a history of code, just the history of a single project)

- M. Campbell-Kelly, From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog, http://amzn.to/1RicYpS (which, while not quite as amazing as the others, is the only history of the software industry as a whole I know of.)