HN Explorer

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

299 points by luzer7 ↗ HN
I found this post about ARPA Net a few months ago and finally had time to read it. Anyone have other great reads or know of books on computing technology?

I think knowing the history of how we got to where we are helps to understand ot more.

Link: https://technicshistory.wordpress.com/2019/05/08/arpanet-par...

114 comments

[ 5.0 ms ] story [ 176 ms ] thread
[deleted]
(comment deleted)
flyinprogrammer
Does anyone know anything about the history of Java's Keytool/Ketstore?

I've always been curious as to why this pattern was adopted, because it seems to be unique to Java, and I don't know why.

pixelmonkey
This is a lovely 30-minute read on the history of the C programming language, written by Dennis Ritchie (dmr), one of its authors.

https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html

Here's a comment I wrote about it elsewhere:

https://lobste.rs/s/hba9nn/development_c_language_1993#c_hw6...

One other essay that comes to mind is the 1945 piece by Vannevar Bush, "As We May Think", that lays out the vision for a "Memex", or memory extension device, in the direction of what PCs and smartphones eventually became.

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

I think it's nice to reflect on a time, not too long ago, where these devices were a mere figment of a scientist's imagination, only to materialize decades in the future. What can you dream up today?

khaledh
Check this thread[1] from a few weeks ago. The Dream Machine is a great book that goes into great detail from the very beginning, and how we got here.

[1]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281

lordgrenville
This book is really all OP needs, as it covers computing from Turing to MS-DOS. Although ostensibly a biography of Licklider, it uses him as a skeleton to tell a much wider story about the idea of the computer as an extension of the human brain (as opposed to just a fast calculator).
csallen
Seconded. One of the more impressive books I've ever read, the way the author tells the story of the computer, which has a very complex history. He does a great job weaving together all the bits and pieces while also keeping it engaging and human.
melvinroest
What I'm about to link considers the multimedia aspect of computing and a bit the history of the world wide web.

__Vannevar Bush__

Vannevar Bush is the person who came up with the idea that one could link information as opposed to methods that physical libraries use (catalogs, indexing, etc.). His implementation details are funny to read in hindsight. His conceptual ideas are nothing but amazing and a reality at the moment. It also highlights why we should separate conceptual ideas from implementation. The biggest reason is: despite the fact that you can't implement a certain system yet, having the conceptual ideas ready means that other people can be inspired by it when the technological requirements catch up.

Read his seminal essay "As We May Think" here:

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

__Douglas Engelbart__

If Vannevar Bush is considered the grandfather, then Douglas Engelbart is considered to be the father of multimedia.

Read Douglas Engelbart his seminal paper from 1962 on how multimedia would help humans process information faster. It's called:

Augmenting Human Intellect: A Conceptual Framework

https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/138

Check out the mother of all demo's: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

and here: https://www.dougengelbart.org/content/view/209/448/

Engelbart just blew my mind. He basically prototyped a simple version of TeamViewer + Skype in 1968! And even still, it has features in there that I still haven't seen (dual mouse control when using TeamViewer).

I wonder if Bill Gates read about him because if he did, then it was either too hard to implement some of Engelbart's his ideas in Windows 95, or he simply didn't read about it and now we're lagging 10 to 20 years behind on certain aspects of our multimedia experience.

__Ted Nelson__

The "younger brother" (= same time, related but not the same ideas) of Douglas. Ted Nelson is a bit of a controversial figure. Nevertheless, I do think he deserves a spot on this list. I'll leave it at that.

__I wrote a bit more about this stuff__

If you like this stuff, I invite you to read some of the introductory stuff of my thesis [1].

[1]

First 3 paragraphs of: https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/

and

1.3.1 "In the beginning" of https://melvinroest.github.io/ximpel/documentation/theses/ma...

The thesis itself zooms in on an old concept called hypermedia (not hypermedia APIs, that came way later), which is a bit of an alternate reality of HTML5. While that's not really important to know about, it shares the same history up until the early 90's.

AriaMinaei
> I think knowing the history of how we got to where we are helps to understand ot more.

This is a great attitude, especially in our largely ahistoric industry. I wish I thought this way when I started programming.

The book "The Dream Machine" [0] does a fantastic job going into the ideas driving the pioneers. It especially focuses on ARPA and PARC, so you'll get a nice overview of the ideas explored there. And it is a fun read too.

It was out of print for quite some time, until Stripe Press bought the rights and brought it back to print [1]. They also give it away at conferences, as they want more people to be exposed to the ideas of the book.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1...

[1] https://press.stripe.com/#the-dream-machine

AlphaWeaver
Wow, can't believe nobody has mentioned the classic, _Hackers_, by Steven Levy.

Another book I found interesting, but is focused more on the early history of Silicon Valley as a whole, not just computing, is _Valley of Genius_, by Adam Fisher.

random_moonwalk
Valley of Genius is a fun way to become acquainted with some of the Valley's history (for those who haven't read it, it's an oral history comprised of interview snippets from a bunch of key pioneers and people who were at the right place at the right time).
F00Fbug
_Hackers_ is the first thing that came to mind when I saw this... fantastic book!
wcarss
Don Eyles' writing about programming the lunar module (which was something he did!) is fantastic [1]. There's also a gallery of photos on that site and he has a whole book!

And, click around on Bret Victor's references page[2] -- it's a real treasure. Despite my constant fear that mentioning it will make it go away, it needs to be shared to be useful. It's a big collection of classic papers and interviews. Someone mentioned "As You May Think", which is on there, as is Bush's follow-up from ~20 years later, and Douglas Engelbart's own partly annotated version of the original!

Also check out folklore[3], which is a great bunch of stories about working at Apple in its early days, by people who worked there (mostly Andy Hertzfeld, I'm pretty sure).

Lastly, look up "Ignition!" by John Drury Clark[4], which is a tangent, but is amazing -- it's about the history of the design of rocket engines, largely about the wild experiments and chemical science involved, and is very well written. I didn't feel right finding a pdf to link straight to, but they aren't that hard to find.

As a bonus, this isn't so much historical, but it's a great inspirational essay, Richard Hamming's "You and Your Research"(transcript[5], a video version[6]). Talks about working at Bell Labs and the different cultural elements there across people as part of analysing what makes certain people truly great.

1 - https://www.doneyles.com/LM/Tales.html

2 - http://worrydream.com/refs/

3 - https://www.folklore.org/

4 - https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Drury_Clark

5 - https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.htm

6 - https://youtu.be/a1zDuOPkMSw

peter5878
Not an article, but Kirk McKusick (a very longtime developer of BSD) gave a few talks on BSD and UNIX history (and the beginnings of TCP/IP), which are on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bVSXXeiFLgk

If you prefer text, you can find it in Chapter 1 of his book "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System": https://www.amazon.com/Design-Implementation-FreeBSD-Operati... (the chapter seems to be available in the book preview)

Eric S. Raymond also wrote a nice chapter on UNIX history in "The Art of Unix Programming": http://www.catb.org/esr/writings/taoup/html/historychapter.h...

luzer7
Thanks, looks very interesting.
erwan
A couple years ago I attend this talk by Paul Wesling at Stanford. It's the most interesting, exhaustive account I have heard. It goes all the way back to the early days of Ham Radio enthusiasm in the Bay Area around the early 1910s, following the stories of three pioneers: Jack McCullough, William Eitel, and Charles Litton to modern days.

It was a special day that day... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lRDB_W6POys you can see me sitting on the floor at 1:40 :^)

melvinroest
Here's another entry that's a bit unorganized. It's also a bit more of a recent (and sometimes older) history related things that I learned about mostly through HN. Replies / additions to this are welcome.

__Lisp (programming language)__

The Structure and Implementation of Computer Programs (you need to use a search engine for this, there are many different versions of it).

Anything Paul Graham wrote about Lisp (e.g. http://www.paulgraham.com/avg.html)

__Hacking__

http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html

__Smalltalk (programming language)__

Alan Kay Smalltalk is not about objects, it's about messaging: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21852444

Smalltalk is awesome and one of the historical predecessors of Objective-C.

__Xerox Parc__

Unfortunately, I don't know of any seminal paper or media piece. I just know they were hugely influential. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PARC_(company)

Alan Kay worked there.

kabdib
For Xerox, Hiltzik's Dealers of Lightning is a good source.

(The opportunities that Xerox lost because of short-sightedness, political shenanigans and just plain incompetence will probably make you mad. It's a good cautionary tale).

SilasX
Relatedly I’m interested in the history of computing and information sciences in preindustrial times, ie how they scaled out record keeping in the Byzantine empire or Islamic golden age.
smoyer
This is a pretty easy question to answer ... here are the links to history articles that I thought enough of to bookmark (note that a few are NOT computer/tech related) - https://pinboard.in/u:smoyer/t:history.
japhyr
UNIX: A History and a Memoir by Brian Kernighan is excellent. It traces the history of Unix from the early days at Bell Labs through the period where it reached widespread use in the rest of the world. It's a fascinating history of people building the command line tools that we still use today, and the environment that allows those tools to be combined in powerful ways.

I came away with a much clearer picture of how these systems were developed, and I am a little better on the command line for understanding the original philosophy better as well.

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-History-Memoir-Brian-Kernighan/d...