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Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

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Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#301

Post by Dalrymple »

RT-11 (a real-time, largely foreground/background operating system for the PDP-11)

I have heard that the RT-11 OS was a one man effort at DEC, which for many years was more popular than Unix on the PDP-11, but I don't know the details. Do any DEC experts know more about this?

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#302

Post by deltaonefour »

scythe wrote: post #268
deltaonefour wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The writing for shows is team based. Its just not this way for lit. I think it's just a cultural habitual thing. No real logic behind why. Japan still uses fax machines. No logical reasoning behind why.

>The writing for shows is team based. Your typical TV show has more plot holes than cheesecloth, though. That doesn't seem like a fair comparison.

I think it's fair. Lit has tons of plot holes. It's just not talked about as much and less noticeable. Harry potter, for example, has tons of plot holes.

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#303

Post by wrycoder »

srvmshr wrote: post #134

The original Linux kernel was entirely Linus Torvald's work. Also the same applies for Git. GNU Emacs was Richard Stallman entirely. Most Linux tools we use e.g. cURL, wget etc, started out as one person effort for a very long time until they caught attention. Another way to look at it: all the tools you use now are team efforts after a lone developer perfected it to a usable release, where people were largely impres…

RMS did emacs, gcc, gdb, early libc, and probably the first versions of many of the GNU utilities. And, most importantly, the GPL.

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#304

Post by sneak »

progre wrote: post #83
pforret wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what? One week? How much coffee was necessary for that?

Normal finnish consumtion, about 0.2 kg of beans per week.

I thought I drank a ton of espresso every day. Then I visited Helsinki.

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#305

Post by 8bitsrule »

Radio engineer and ham Grote Reber [1] independently pioneered radio astronomy back in the late 1930s by building a dish in his back yard in Illinois.[2] (Noone else who knew about Jansky's results followed up.) Tech in that day wasn't up to working at 3.3GHz, so he moved down to 910MHz then 157MHz. In 1939 he discovered Cygnus-A. In 1954 he moved to Tasmania to get away from man-made interference!

[1][https://public.nrao.edu/news/grote-reber-radio-astronomy-pio...] [2][https://web.archive.org/web/20060927053750/https://www.bigea...] (by John Kraus who ran Ohio's "Big Ear" operation)

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#308

Post by kleiba »

John Sinclair (not the poet) is both the name of a German pulp horror series as well as of its main character. New books appear every week, and although initially some of them were written by others, the whole series is mainly the creation of a single author, Jason Dark. Because of his age, the series is now written by a team of authors with Dark only contributing one novel per months roughly.

The series has been published continuously since the 1970s.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Sinclair_(German_fiction)

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#309

Post by dig1 »

Gambit Scheme [1]. Marc started it 34 years ago and still is going strong. Recent versions has support for generating js/php/python/ruby code, but I'm not sure what the current state is. One of the most portable and optimizing scheme compilers around.

newLISP [2] is still maintained and Lutz is frequent on forum.

Kawa Scheme [3], very good optimizing scheme on JVM, started 24 years ago. Per Bothner, author, is frequent on forum, although he'd like someone to continue developing it.

PicoLisp [4], started 34 years ago. Alexander Burger is still maintaining it, latest version was 2 months ago.

LFE [5], started by Robert Virding (one of Erlang authors), 14 years ago. Still developed.

Calibre [6], started 15 years ago by Kovid Goyal. Still in heavy development by Kovid.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambit_(Scheme_implementation)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NewLISP

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kawa_(Scheme_implementation)

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PicoLisp

[5] https://lfe.io/

[6] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calibre_(software)

Re: Ask HN: Single-person creations that have stood the test of time?

#310

Post by deltaonefour »

bduerst wrote: post #230
LaserDiscMan wrote: post #50

The lines blur between creation/discovery for some of these. Additionally, the historic nature makes it impossible to determine if these were all the work of a single individual, but I'll go with: Joseph Shivers - Lycra/Spandex Albert Hoffman - LSD Anton Köllisch - MDMA (was killed in WW1) John Pemberton - Coca Cola (significantly different to the modern drink) John Baird Glen - Propofol Percy Spencer - Microwave Ove…

John Wesley Hyatt - Plastic The guy was trying to make ivory-free pool balls and discovered something that changed the future.

>The guy was trying to make ivory-free pool balls and discovered something that changed the future.

For the better or for worse?

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