In 1997, two of your Numerical Recipes authors (Press and Teukolsky) were asked to write an article on the early history -- and a bit on the philosophy -- of the whole Numerical Recipes enterprise. This article appeared in the now-defunct magazine "Computers in Physics".

For those of you who missed it at the time ;) here is a link to the manuscript, as a PDF file:

http://www.nr.com/CiP97.pdf

(The fonts are poor on the screen, but will print in high quality on most printers. Sorry about that...)