I highly recommend In the Plex to anyone on Hacker News interested in tech folklore. I'm sure even Googlers would find stories they hadn't heard before. The story of Google is an epic story fit for Homeric interpretation.

Steven Levy also wrote the excellent Crypto which covers the emergence of strong public cryptography. It is not a story of accidental discovery, but about active sabotage by the NSA and perseverance by a number of visionaries like Whit Diffie and Martin Hellman working under the radar and outside the mainstream.

http://www.amazon.com/Crypto-Rebels-Government-Privacy-Digit...