history-of-computing.md

History of Computing

• [people]

• [history-of-the-internet]

• [hypercard]

• [history-of-the-games-industry]

• [history-of-operating-systems]

• [logical-organization]

• The Prehistory of Computing, Part II

  • machines

• computerhistory.org/blogs

• bitsavers.org

  • Magazines, software, communications archive of documents

  • rsync is the preferred method for cloning and syncing with the archive. This site has no javascript, data bases or any of that Web 2.0 stuff You can clone the entire archive with rsync -av rsync://bitsavers.org:/bitsavers/ bitsavers/ As of Nov, 2022, the entire archive is around 880gb

• The 7 Most Influential Papers in Computer Science History

• Advent of Computing

  • Podcast - Early IBM and Jupiter Ace
  • Early text editors

• a history of the tty 2024

  • [terminal]

• How did Dennis Ritchie produce his PhD thesis? A typographical mystery (2022) (princeton.edu) pdf

  • how the creator of C and the creator of unix created a PhD thesis, that was never accepted, about the foundations of computation (e.g. nested loops and function calls) with ridiculously primitive tooling. A mystery! and a piece of history!

• What Happened to the Japanese PC Platforms?

  • PC-98 had x86 and a special port of windows, so just faded out and transitioned to normal PCs

• The story of the first "computer bug"... is a pile of lies.

  • Bug was a term for engineering defects in the 1800's (used by Edison, and other before)

• BBC Computer Literacy Project 1980 to 1980 *

• A USB interface to the "Mother of All Demos" keyset

  • Douglas Engelbart in th 60's had a "zoom call with a mouse" ... MAD!!!
  • It took 20 years for people to catch on and understand the vision
  • 1986 KTEH54 - Silicon Valley "Boomtown" [Part-1]

• pcjs.org

  • PC Emulators in browser for loads of early DOS and Windows versions

• How the IBM PC Won, Then Lost, the Personal Computer Market

  • Brilliant description of 1980 (invention) to 1986 (exit) of IBM with the PC architecture

• C64 Home Companion George Beekman 198x?

  • Spreadsheets for home accounts
  • Modems

• Ancient Babylonian Algorithms: The Earliest Programs 1600bc

  • [[algorithums]]

• Let's Not Dumb Down the History of Computer Science By Donald E. [knuth], Len Shuste 2021

• PAPERCRAFT MODELS #papercraft

  • Construct the computer from your childhood or build an entire computer museum at home with these paper models, free to download and share
  • Print, Cut, Score, Fold and Glue

• Highly Detailed Collectibles and Handcrafted Miniature Scale Models - of Vintage Computers

• Tiny PDP11 emulator on ESP32

• PDP-11 Booting

  • Animated gifs and guide of the boot process

• Domesday86

  • A UK custom laserdisk community project to document the nation before CD-ROMs
  • Currently undergoing a restoration project to run it on modern hardware

• Telex 1960 - text communication

• mandelbrot on an old IBM mainframe

• archive.org

  • Magazines, Software
  • The Long Now of the Web: Inside the Internet Archive’s Fight Against Forgetting 2026

• Computer History Wiki

• Apple II connecting via modem

• TODO: BBC archived educational videos from 80's

• PC Format Magazine - Internet Archive (small collection)

• PC Zone Magazine

• The Computer Revolution Hasn't Happened Yet 1997

  • Alan Kay talks about his vision of object oriented programming and how to design scalable systems

• Nineteen Seventy Three

  • Long-Form/Podcast: Chile's audacious 1970s-era plan to network and automate the country's entire economy, hindered by political upheaval and CIA maneuvering.

• Hidden Figures

  • Hidden Figures is a 2016 American biographical drama film. It is loosely based on the 2016 non-fiction book about African American female mathematicians who worked at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) during the Space Race. 1960's

• Lost CGA game: Golden Flute found after 40 years

  • Achieving is amazing
  • Some kids were pretty damn smart

Old Mainframes

• IBM 1401 let's program #8, primes
  • find #prime numbers up to 255. Programmed with flipping switches
  • Wonderful 3D unreal engine recreation of the IBM 1401
    • the virtual data center - a 1401 3D simulation
• Computer Conservation Society UK

Mechanical Computers

• u.s navy vintage fire control computers (part 1)
• Mechanical Computer (All Parts) - Basic Mechanisms In Fire Control Computers

BioInformatics

1990 started project to sequence human genome By 2000 after world colaboration sequenced the first human genome By 2019 we can sequence one in 24hours (at scale)

Preserving Hardware

• Don't Piss Off Bradley, the Parts Seller Keeping Atari Machines Alive
  • Old unused Atari parts

Preserving Data

• Thoughts on "The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation" 2021

  • (I love the font and background - so readable!)

• How to send an 'E mail' - Database - 1984

Other

• How Atari took on Apple in the 1980s home PC wars

• This Code Smells of Desperation

  • math exception handler of WIN87EM.DLL, the Windows 3.1 math emulator and FPU support library

Historically hard computing problems

• A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering
  • In 1984, With only kb of memory, you could not keep the whole dictionary in memory. So there needed to be compression and data segmentation.
  • In 2024 this is trivial

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• Mr TIFF
  • [compression-image]