I've read Alan Kay refer to the field of programming as pop culture in Coders at Work and the following interview on drdobbs:
"Pop culture is all about identity and feeling like you're participating. It has nothing to do with cooperation, the past or the future — it's living in the present. I think the same is true of most people who write code for money. They have no idea where [their culture came from]."
http://www.drdobbs.com/architecture-and-design/interview-with-alan-kay/240003442?pgno=1
What books, documentaries, papers, essays, etc would you recommend to someone hoping to better verse themselves in programming/software's history?
Origins and precursors, 1936 - 1982: Turing, Von Neumann, Shannon, etc. http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~christos/classics/cs298.html
A Golden Age? 1964 -- 1974 http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2059
Significant new inventions in computing since 1980 http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...
Lisp machines, other language-based machines and OS: Smalltalk, etc. https://github.com/jon-jacky/Piety/blob/master/doc/precursor...