You’ll likely want to learn how to retrieve books from storage and use ILL.

The most commonly assigned textbook on databases is Ramez Almasri’s Fundamentals of Database Systems, now in its seventh edition.

C.J. Date’s Introduction to Database Systems, last updated in 2004, is a classic text and includes helpful introductions to many database concepts. You might also be interested in Date’s Relational Database Dictionary (2006).

Before Wired came Datamation: the leading popular magazine about computing from the ’60s through the ’80s. Looking at back-issues is a great way to understand a technology in its context, and you can do that on the Internet Archive.

Byte was a widely read magazine about personal computing in the ’80s and ’90s. Its back issues, like Datamation‘s, are available online. (The same site offers complete runs of Macworld and MacUser.)

You may find it helpful to look at scanned IBM manuals. For a history of IBM, see Emerson Pugh, Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and its Technology (1995).

For a history of the software industry, see Martin Campbell-Kelly’s From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry (2003).

James Cortada has a useful bibliography of the computing industry, with an emphasis on computers’ business applications.

To get a sense of how popular media covered technical developments, I find Factiva the most useful database. Be sure to use the advanced search interface so that you can extend the range of your search.