The Story of Mel
When I was young and the Internet wasn't broadly available yet, my favorite way to spend my time was digging through a bookshelf and reading whatever randomness I found. A lot of things I still love to this day were discovered with some oddball book in a library or used book store. One day, in my teenage years, I found a hardcopy version of the Jargon File. I have never been quite the same since. I think that book and my high school having an old DEC workstation running Ultrix are two of the most consequential events in my life.
The particular edition I found was The New Hacker's Dictionary. The style of writing made a huge impression on me. In fact, there is a section about that writing style in the book itself. You can still find the Project Gutenberg edition here. I highly recommend it if you have even a passing interest in the early days of computing and the strange breed of people who made it all work.
In particular, though, I want to call your attention to The Story of Mel. Every time I read it, I get smacked in the face with nostalgia. The idea of knowing a machine in the depth described in that story is basically what got me into computers.
...back in the Good Old Days, when the term "software" sounded funny and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes, Real Programmers wrote in machine code. Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language. Machine Code. Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers. Directly.
— Ed Nather
If you enjoy this strange old world of forgotten computers and the hackers who made them work, I can strongly recommend the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. Not coincidentally, the story of that MIT AI lab leads directly to RMS and the GNU project. If you love open-source software, take the time to learn your history. You won't regret an afternoon digging into the lore.