I did a quick search and I didn’t see HOPL mentioned (History of Programming Languages). You can learn a lot about this history of computing in general by going through that workshop series.
HOPL IV was just last year and had some great talks. https://hopl4.sigplan.org
Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
91–100 of 157 posts
Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
#92If you like podcasts, there is Advent of Computing. It's not chronological, instead covering a different topic every episode. Most recent episodes are about magnetic core memory, INTERCAL, a hypertext system developed by the US military, and the Analytical Engine, respectively. There's over 80 episodes now so there's a lot to learn about.
Website: https://adventofcomputing.com/ RSS: https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/rss
If you want an idea of how computers work, there are toy virtual machines that are a good teaching tool (https://peterhigginson.co.uk/RISC/).
Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
#93I'm not at all sure that learning about computer history and learning about how computers work are the same thing. For example, looking at early microprocessors would give you the idea that instruction set architectures are completely random when in fact their designers were faced with a limited transistor budget and very short development times. Often, microprocessors were offered as a replacement for discrete logic…
Lookup tables are a good way to do fast arithmetic. Some IEEE 754 implementations still use them - usually with interpolation - for certain functions.
That aside - hardware technologies, storage systems, ISAs, engineering enhancements (like paging, caches, microcode, and others), operating systems, market segmentation (micro, mini, super, etc), languages, and compiler theory all have their own separate histories.
You don't need to know the histories to write good code, but they're all interesting in their own right.
All the book suggestions here are good, but I'd also recommend a rummage through the huge bitsavers computing archive (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/) for first hand notes, memos, and documents from a huge selection of manufacturers and facilities.
It's a bit of a disorganised grab bag with a fair amount of noise, but the IBM, DEC, Burroughs, CDC and various university archives have some fascinating material.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
#94Good: split your time between activities and reading something as satisfying as the things you “devour”. To that end, I would plus one Hackers (Levy) and Code (Petzold). Also, the Cathedral and the Bazaar by esr http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ and other things from esr at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ including the aforementioned jargon file. Here’s one I hadn’t stumbled on before, ‘Things Every Hacke…
Having gotten into computers in the early 1990s, I knew a lot of "Things Every Hacker Once Knew", but I did find something exciting that I didn't know in the discussion of ASCII control characters:
>ETB (End of Transmission Block) = Ctrl-W >Nowadays this is usually "kill window" on a web browser, but it used to mean "delete previous word" in some contexts and sometimes still does.
I tried Ctrl-W in a Linux console and it works! This will save me some trouble in the future.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
#95Good: split your time between activities and reading something as satisfying as the things you “devour”. To that end, I would plus one Hackers (Levy) and Code (Petzold). Also, the Cathedral and the Bazaar by esr http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ and other things from esr at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ including the aforementioned jargon file. Here’s one I hadn’t stumbled on before, ‘Things Every Hacke…
Though the cathedral/bazaar terminology is influential, I am not sure reading the original text helps understand open source as it actually is now. It concludes that open source would drive out closed source software, when what we see is open libraries being much more popular than open applications. This is in part due to Raymond's own work at the Open Source Initiative. I'd probably be better for someone now to read a retrospective rather than a treatise.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
#96I think the best way to learn this stuff is from the people who did it, speaking in their own words. But watching videos takes forever, so the best way to do this is to read oral histories. The Computer History Museum has really great content-- I've read dozens of these. You can easily find them, ranking in approximate order of popularity, with the following google search:
https://www.google.com/search?q=oral+history+computer+museum...
To find more (and there are many great ones outside of the Museum), you can try a broader search:
https://www.google.com/search?q=oral+history+arpa+filetype%3...
I have found that I can read around 3-5x faster than listening to people talk, depending on the speed of the speaker (most of the people interviewed in these oral histories are quite old and can speak a bit slower), and I also retain the information much better. There is something about reading an actual conversation by someone who was there when this stuff was being invented (or literally invented it themselves) that you don't get from reading a retrospective historical account, and it makes the information stick with you more, since it's all framed in stories and personal accounts.
Some favorites:
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107503/oh...
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107247/oh...
https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Hist...
http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107613/oh...
https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/valenti...
https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107642/oh...
There are so many other good ones, but that's a good start!
Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
#97Good: split your time between activities and reading something as satisfying as the things you “devour”. To that end, I would plus one Hackers (Levy) and Code (Petzold). Also, the Cathedral and the Bazaar by esr http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/ and other things from esr at http://www.catb.org/~esr/ including the aforementioned jargon file. Here’s one I hadn’t stumbled on before, ‘Things Every Hacke…
Though the cathedral/bazaar terminology is influential, I am not sure reading the original text helps understand open source as it actually is now. It concludes that open source would drive out closed source software, when what we see is open libraries being much more popular than open applications. This is in part due to Raymond's own work at the Open Source Initiative. I'd probably be better for someone now to read…
> It concludes that open source would drive out closed source software
Relative to the pre-FLOSS era, this is exactly what has happened. FLOSS is ubiquitous today in systems software. Many of the current Big Tech companies and business practices simply would not exist without FLOSS computing infrastructure.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
#98If you can manage a day trip to Cambridge (about an hour from London), you should visit the excellent Museum of Computing History http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park is also excellent.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
#99I have the same passion about computing history. I can't count the amount of literature I've read to learn about this fascinating history; it's very satisfying to know when, how, where, and by who original work was done to advance computing. Most of the foundational work in computer architecture and computer science was done in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. From there it has been incremental improvements.
I highly recommend reading "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell Waldrop. It's very well written, and covers a huge swath of computing history, from the ENIAC to the Internet (it was written in 2000).
Instead of recommending specific sources (too many), I can mention key milestones in computing history that you may want to research:
- Theory of computation (Alan Turing, Alonzo Church)
- Early binary systems (John Atanasoff, Konrad Zuse, George Stibitz, Claude Shannon)
- Early computers (ABC, ENIAC, EDSAC, EDVAC, Von Neumann architecture)
- Early programming (Assembly language, David Wheeler, Nathaniel Rochester)
- Early interactive computing (MIT Whirlwind, SAGE, TX-0, TX-2)
- Early mainframes (UNIVAC, IBM 70x series)
- Early programming languages (Speedcoding, Autocode, A-0, A-2, MATH-MATIC, FLOW-MATIC)
- First programming languages (FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, ALGOL)
- Early operating systems (GM-NAA I/O, BESYS, SOS, IBSYS, FMS)
- Early time-sharing system (MIT CTSS, Multics, DTSS, Berkeley TSS, IBM CP-67)
- Early Virtual Memory (Atlas, Burroughs MCP)
- Early minicomputers (DEC PDP line)
- Mainframe operating systems (IBM OS/360, UNIVAC EXEC)
- Early online transaction processing (SABRE, IBM ACP/TPF)
- Early work on concurrency (Edsger Dijkstra, C.A.R. Hoare, Per Birch Hansen)
- Early database systems (GE IDS, IBM IMS, CODASYL)
- Early Object-Oriented Programming (Simula I, Simula 67, Smalltalk)
- More programming languages (CPL, BCPL, B, C, BASIC, PL/I)
- Mini/Supermini operating systems (Tenex, TOPS-20, VMS)
- Structured Programming (Pascal, Modula, Niklaus Wirth)
- Relational data model and SQL (Codd, Chamberlin, Boyce)
I could keep going on, but this is already too long. I hope this at least puts your feet on the first steps.
Re: Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
#100"The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
It tells the history of computing by following J.C.R Licklider. As one of the directors of ARPA, he was responsible for funding research labs to work on computer research. He had a major impact on which projects got funded, and in-turn which systems are now being used 60 years later. I honestly love this book so much. If you love computers and history, its a must-read.