Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#111

Post by DanBC » Sun, Apr 19, 2020, 5:29 PM UTC

There are some great recommendations here. I like RFC 2468: https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2468

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#112

Post by wojtczyk » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 5:28 AM UTC

edge17 wrote: post #55

Steve Blank's Secret History of Silicon Valley talk is very interesting - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTC_RxWN_xo

Learned something new - the time before Shockley.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#113

Post by mattbrewsbytes » Mon, Apr 20, 2020, 1:18 PM UTC

For more recent history, Alan Kay gave a couple talks at Stanford that are on Youtube. He goes over much of the work done at PARC. It might spark an interest in one of those topics to dive deeper into.

Re: Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?

#114

Post by csense » Tue, Apr 21, 2020, 2:30 AM UTC

Not a link, but a video. A computer from 1959 (IBM 1401) at the Computer History Museum, compiling FORTRAN.

The Youtube user has a lot of good material on restoring historical hardware.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFQ3sajIdaM

Also, be sure to read the email thread linked in the video comments. It's a conversation between the restoration team and the compiler's original authors (now in their 90s).

If you're in SF and you want to see the 1401 in action, the Computer History Museum used to show it to the public on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Hopefully those demos will resume once the coronavirus situation's resolved.