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Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

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Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?

#1

Post by Tmkly »

I'm a software engineer, mainly working on mobile apps (iOS primarily) through React Native and some Swift/Java. I have a CS degree and about 7 years in this field.

However recently I've become very aware that JS/TS and Swift etc are just APIs on top of APIs. I've been drawn to learning more about how computers work, the history of programming/computers (Unix, Sinclair, commodore, etc and even going back to Ada Lovelace, Babbage and mainframes in the 1950s) and things like memory allocation. I've tried learning some BASIC and Assembly code but haven't really got very far. I read/devour articles on sites like https://twobithistory.org but they only get you so far.

What can I do to help accelerate this and satiate this desire to learn more about how computers work? I live in London, UK and would be happy to spend some money on a uni course or something if there was a good one. I learn best practically so like to be "doing" something as well as theory.

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

#4

Post by srvmshr »

I think the way to go about it is read some books gradually on history of computing & the various designs and rationale that evolved over time. Consider these sources:

1. The Annotated Turing.

2. A History of Modern Computing 3ed

3. The ACM Turing award lectures

4. Theory of computation - Dexter Kozen

5. Coders at Work

6. Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution

Additionally, you could subscribe to Communications of ACM, which is a computing oriented monthly magazine.

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

#5

Post by RugnirViking »

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 people do this in minecraft, for myself it was boolean functions in excel. You can and should look many things up during this process, fail and rework designs several times etc. Learning how logic gates work, then scaling the knowledge up to bit adders, registers, ALU, making a cpu instruction set and starting on basic turing machine architecture is a very rewarding hobby and is definately the best way to get low-level knowledge

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

#6

Post by netsharc »

A long while ago I found the Jargon File, it's a "dictionary" of terms used by hackers as the culture was budding at the universities in the 70's. Reading the entries you get a glimpse of the technology and culture of those places at that time. Young me found it really cool in a nerdy way, and read all the entries from front to back. Since this was before the always online times, I was just reading the TXT file from http://jargon-file.org/archive/ rather than needing to navigate the many pages: http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/

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

#7

Post by robotguy »

Ben Eater's Youtube series "Building an 8-bit Breadboard Computer" is a really good introduction to the lowest levels of how a computer works:

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2...

I recommended it to my daughter when she was taking a class in R and asked "But how does the COMPUTER know what to do?"

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

#8

Post by Jtsummers »

So your title and comment suggest two slightly different things. For "how computers work?" I recommend Code by Petzold (higher level, good book) and The Elements of Computing Systems by Nisan and Schocken (also available here: https://www.nand2tetris.org/). The latter is project based and has you develop a computer starting at NAND gates and working up. It can be run through at a good clip while still learning a lot if you're a moderately experienced developer.

EDIT: Per Amazon there's a second edition of Code coming out at some point, but no date that I've been able to find.

I've also got a copy of, but not yet read, Ideas That Created the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science edited by Harry R. Lewis, the contents are in chronological order with the most recent in 1979. It has 46 different papers on computing, being largely historical this ought to be a decent starting point as well.

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

#9

Post by leohonexus »

Jtsummers wrote: post #8

So your title and comment suggest two slightly different things. For "how computers work?" I recommend Code by Petzold (higher level, good book) and The Elements of Computing Systems by Nisan and Schocken (also available here: https://www.nand2tetris.org/ ). The latter is project based and has you develop a computer starting at NAND gates and working up. It can be run through at a good clip while still learning a lot…

I’d also add the book “But How Do It Know?” from J. Clark Scott as a fantastic primer, building from gates to RAM and CPU, to a simple bootloader and assembly programming. It comes with a CPU simulator on the book’s website so you could make sense of what you’re learning - and being a light read you could reasonably finish it in a week.

http://www.buthowdoitknow.com

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

#10

Post by listenfaster »

Good: 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 Hacker Once Knew’

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/

For an activity ymmv depending on how much time you can spend; an alternative to building a computer from scratch, or an OS from scratch, is to buy a vintage cheapie running cp/m or dos, something where the OS isn’t abstracting memory management for you. Growing up in the 80s, I think managing my own memory and _everything_ that implies was the greatest teacher.

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