Great Read! I have been mulling over the idea of creating a curated list of interesting Programming Stories. Here are some of those which I can remember from top of my head:
There's also the stories of Knuth inventing and writing TeX and Metafont because he isn't happy with the way his books are typeset and of RMS and the Xerox 9700, but I don't know whether these have been written well yet.
The Royal McBee LPG-30 was the computer that Edward Lorenz was using to solve his simplified atmospheric model when he noticed a difference between different runs of the program depending on the rounding error when typing in parameters from the printout of a previous run.
11 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 35.9 ms ] threadUnderstandable, but annoying.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1490069 (158 points, 1727 days ago, 33 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7797878 (13 points, 307 days ago, 8 comments)
Also relevant. Remotion of the blink tag in Firefox:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6170392 (101 points, 599 days ago, 93 comments)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6182690 (309 points, 597 days ago, 146 comments)
This last submission has two interesting comments, that I'll copy partially:
> I fixed blink in Mozilla twice in the old days, back when I was running around looking for things to fix. [...]
> You can put jwz's blink in your browser profile's userContent.css to make it work on all websites [...]
https://www.google.co.uk/webhp?q=blink+tag#safe=off&q=blink+...
* 500 Mile Email [http://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html]
* Infinitely Profitable Program [http://peetm.com/blog/?p=55]
* The PGPi Scanning Project [http://www.pgpi.org/pgpi/project/scanning/]
* DirectX vs OpenGL [http://programmers.stackexchange.com/a/88055/75581]
Think anyone can contribute?
There's also the stories of Knuth inventing and writing TeX and Metafont because he isn't happy with the way his books are typeset and of RMS and the Xerox 9700, but I don't know whether these have been written well yet.