The Coroner's Toolkit (aka TCT) was written by myself and my erstwhile collegue, Wietse Venema, and was originally released (I think? :)) in 1999. This is fossil ware, basically :)

I might claim that it was the first foray into the more serious field of computer forensics, which until that time had been a bit mired in dd'ing disks and that sort of thing.

Looking at the bibliography that we shipped with it... there were zero books on Forensic Computing even written, just scraps and pieces from other disciplines... that sure changed fast ;)

I guess my main things in here were Lazarus (invented data carving and gave the first ray of hope to recovering lost data on UNIX/Linux style systems; basically wrote it over a weekend with a bit of insight) & MACtimes. Wietse did all the hard C stuff, and ported file(1) for my pathetically slow Laz.

Brian Carrier took TCT and created Sleuthkit from it; I'd advise you to seek out his stuff or other tools for modern forensic challenges....