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

Could not agree more with The Idea Factory, his talks are also great. I also came away feeling inspired, nostalgic and the book is very fun. They are some real characters.

There’s some good picks in the similar books I’ve been looking at: https://www.goodreads.com/book/similar/16750267-the-idea-fac...

If you haven’t read Ben Franklins autobiography it’s also pretty fun and inspiring.

While much more on the technical side of things, both Ken Shirriff and Curious Marc are great resources for a lot of the historical and technical aspects of things.

I'd highly recommend both of them for looking at specific topics of how the computing hardware worked:

- Marc's videos on old HP computers, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qn2Zz8X41dI&list=PL-_93BVApb... - Marc's videos on restoring some old IBM hardware, that includes a good bit of the history that went into them, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WS-WtjwAAO0&list=PL-_93BVApb... and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LtlrITxB5qg&list=PL-_93BVApb... - In fact just look at his playlists directly, https://www.youtube.com/user/mverdiell/playlists

For Ken, I'd look at his chip teardowns and explorations, the AM2901 is on HN this very moment, http://www.righto.com/2020/04/inside-am2901-amds-1970s-bit-s...

A lot of his articles dig into why the different chip technologies were made and fell out of favor eventually too. http://www.righto.com/

I'm most familiar with BBN for their contribution to acoustics, but the firm is best known for its development of ARPANET among other contributions to computing. Here is a PDF of collected stories by employees.

http://www.cbi.umn.edu/hostedpublications/pdf/CultureInnovat...

I have uncovered early mid-20th century imported machines in China in the past, in fact I had an exchange with an HN user who plans on visiting one I found in a mining museum in Gejiu, Yunnan recently. I have seen many interesting domestic products using cheap processors. There were certainly entire Chinese domestic TV entertainment platforms based upon cheap chips (ca. late ~1980s/early 1990s), unsure if they were locally produced but suspect so. Personnel at the current foundries would be a good source of oral history, it would be a great project (but be careful not to conduct it in any way that could be conceived as national security related research). I believe a lot of the chip producers are currently using last-generation gear purchased from Taiwan (who allegedly have a policy of offloading last gen stuff to the mainland but keeping bleeding edge 'at home' on the island).

Also interestingly, Asia is rife with great history with respect to pre-Unicode input systems, romanization systems, glyph and font development, sorting, and so forth. Premodern international script efforts such as Phagspa are awesome, the use of Farsi as a lingua franca, Tamil innovations in keeping giant-keychain style records in lieu of inscribed palm leaves, abugidas, the development of the Korean script, non-Chinese pictographic scripts such as Nushu, Naxi and Yi, etc.

For early calculating devices and automata in China, especially hydraulic and astronomic, look no further than Needham's amazing Science and Civilisation in China, which is ultra expensive to get hold of in print but thanks for great glory of Kazakhstan many volumes of which are now available on libgen for your home learning pleasure.

That Creatures of Thought blog [0] is great. I recommend starting at the beginning as the author gives a pretty strong history of the development of electronics and communications starting around the discovery of electricity to the modern day. I've been working my way through it for weeks and it's been consistently interesting. One of the key themes is how much technological development is intertwined, each person or team building on or coincidently paralleling others.

[0] https://technicshistory.com [1] https://technicshistory.com/2016/11/13/about-techno-history/