Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

news.ycombinator.com

21–30 of 157 posts

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

#21

From a NAND gate to Tetris was excellent. Informative and obvious https://www.nand2tetris.org/

I cannot endorse this enough.

some of it is hard and will have you wondering if you want to continue. if you do, and I highly recommend that every developer complete this course, you will find yourself thinking in new ways and understanding many problems very differently, which is a very good thing.

and you will see huge performance problems in almost all software from them on, because none of this (I gesture vaguely at everything everywhere) should be as slow as it is. none of it.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

#22
Steven Levy's Hackers is a foundational work of the history of computing. Levy spends a lot of time on the MIT hackers of the 1960s and 1970s, the group that hatched Lisp, Richard Stallman and the free software movement, and also a lot of time on the Bay Area hackers that kick-started the microcomputer revolution. Certainly it's not a comprehensive guide to the full range of computing history, but it's an important and engaging look the beginnings of where we are today.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

#23
post #18

Maybe buy a raspberry pi pico and code it in assembly? Or try to find a retro computer, e.g. a BBC micro and start programming it for fun?

I was looking at a vintage computer, so yeah that's a possible route. Been using emulators so far but it's not the real thing. Thanks.

I'd say if you have experience with vintage computer then it's probably worthwhile to get one. However just work with an emulator if it's not too exciting to hold a real machine because the cost of maintenance might be pretty high.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

#25
post #16

There are also several good museums dedicated to the subject. I used to work for the national museum of computing at bletchley park in the UK, and there they have a lot of good exhibits that teach basics of how computers and networking works and has evolved over the years. Another good approach one can take to learn is starting with a simple system with well-defined rules, and making a simple computer out of it. Many…

I've been meaning to visit Bletchley! thanks, these suggestions are helpful

if you do go, my favorite exhibit at Bletchley is the Harwell Dekatron a.k.a WITCH. It's a really good machine for learning how computers work, both because its so early meaning it has simple architecture, but also for other reasons:

It uses base 10 instead of base 2 to store values in its memory, so doing the calculations in your head is a lot easier

It's memory is made from special tubes that have a orange glow at one of 10 positions, meaning you can see the contents of the computer's memory in its entirety just by looking at the machine.

Building off the previous point, you can see the cpu register, which is a single small piece of memory that stores the current data to be modified, which again with the lit-up memory means you can see what the computer is doing at any givenm time.

Finally, the computer has a debugging switch which can pause and step forwards through each instruction the computer is performing, as well as a more granular mode that lets you step through individual parts of an operation (for example each digit being added in a adding operation separately)

It's not always running but if you go I hope you get to see it :)

EDIT: oh and I suppose I should mention there is more than one museum at bletchley, there is the big one that focuses on ww2, but the museum of computing is tucked away to the side a bit.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

#26
> I've become very aware that JS/TS and Swift etc are just APIs on top of APIs.

I'd call them abstractions. This is how it's - high level programming languages (C#) are just abstractions so that we don't have to remember machine instructions. Similar to a name in Contacts connecting to a phone number; the former is far easy to remember.

Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

#28
Ted Nelson's YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson

It's also worth looking at: https://www.youtube.com/user/yoshikiohshima. There's a goldmine of talks by people like Alan Kay and Seymour Papert. An important question to ask when, "probing" the literature-- why are computers the way they are in terms of human-computer interaction and human culture? What is a, "computer" without making an appeal to mathematical concepts like Turing Machines/Lambda Calculus? What are the major, "paradigm shifts" that gave us GUIs, mice, ect...?

It's worth noting that the history of popular computers parallels almost exactly the neoliberal economic period. Atari was founded in 1972. Look into the Mansfield Amendment and ARPA. Try to get past a cultural myth that computer companies started in, "normal" people's garages. Try to see past the, "present concept." Alan Kay has famously said, "The computer revolution hasn't happened yet." It's up to the current/future generations to, "really" define what computers are in terms of human culture. Think, "living history." Think, "world before-after the invention of the Gutenberg printing press."

https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/2000/nsb00215/nsb50/1970/m...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...

Post reply on HN