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

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

#21
Here's another entry that's a bit unorganized. It's also a bit more of a recent (and sometimes older) history related things that I learned about mostly through HN. Replies / additions to this are welcome.

__Lisp (programming language)__

The Structure and Implementation of Computer Programs (you need to use a search engine for this, there are many different versions of it).

Anything Paul Graham wrote about Lisp (e.g. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

__Hacking__

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

__Smalltalk (programming language)__

Alan Kay Smalltalk is not about objects, it's about messaging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852444

Smalltalk is awesome and one of the historical predecessors of Objective-C.

__Xerox Parc__

Unfortunately, I don't know of any seminal paper or media piece. I just know they were hugely influential. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

Alan Kay worked there.

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

#26
UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan is excellent. It traces the history of Unix from the early days at Bell Labs through the period where it reached widespread use in the rest of the world. It's a fascinating history of people building the command line tools that we still use today, and the environment that allows those tools to be combined in powerful ways.

I came away with a much clearer picture of how these systems were developed, and I am a little better on the command line for understanding the original philosophy better as well.

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...

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

#27
The gendered history of programming is particularly interesting for anyone who wants to understand the nature of office culture for software engineering/IT and of computer science academia.

https://timeline.com/women-pioneered-computer-programming-th...

https://web.archive.org/web/20180110125934/

https://www.history.com/news/coding-used-to-be-a-womans-job-... (Please forgive the tone.)

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