New forms of technology tend not to materialize from thin air. The nature of innovation takes existing known technologies and remixes, extends, and co-opts them to create novelty.
Gordon Brander refers to it in this piece as “exapting infrastructure.” As in the case of the internet, it wasn’t nonexistent one day then suddenly connecting all of our computers the next. It wasn’t purposely designed from the beginning as a way for us to connect our millions of computers, phones, and smart TVs. In fact, many types of...
Investor Esther Dyson published this piece in her Release 1.0 newsletter in 19941. It’s a look forward at what the market for content and digital goods with the rise of the internet.
These were the days of CompuServe and AOL, when you had to pay by the hour for access to the net. Software was still sold in a box, still on diskettes, and effectively all media was still consumed in print. Even search engines were in their very early days.
Dyson is prescient here, with some amazingly accurate predictions about how...
Physicians hang diplomas in their waiting rooms. Some fishermen mount their biggest catch. Downstairs in Westborough, it was pictures of computers.
Over the course of a few decades dating beginning in the mid-40s, computing moved from room-sized mainframes with teletype interfaces to connected panes of glass in our pockets. At breakneck speed, we went from the computer being a massively expensive, extremely specialized tool to a ubiquitous part of daily life.
During the 1950s — the days of Claude Shannon, John von Neumann, and MIT’s Lincoln Lab — a “computer”...
This is a presentation from Fernando Corbató from the 1990 ACM Turing Award lectures. Corbató was one of the creators of both the Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) at MIT and Multics, the operating system that influenced Unix.
Fernando Corbató at MIT
He describes the challenges in those programs with their novel approaches: you always encounter failure states when pushing the edge. His takeaways in his experience building “ambitious systems”:
First, the evolution of technology supports a rich future for ambitious...
In 1972 at Xerox PARC, Butler Lampson wrote this memo to the Xerox leadership making the case to produce the Alto computer from Chuck Thacker’s original design. Amazing to think how significant this piece of communication was in the subsequent progress on personal computers and the internet.
At this stage in ‘72, the ARPANET had only been live a couple years, and Bob Metcalfe’s ethernet design was still in the future. And the closest thing to a personal computer at this point was Wes...
Today on the nerdy computer history feed, we’ve got a 1982 video from Bell Labs: The UNIX System: Making Computers More Productive.
Most of the video has Brian Kernighan explaining the structure of UNIX and why it’s different from its contemporary operating systems. I should do more work with the keyboard in my lap and my feet on the desk.
Navigating a Linux shell looks almost identical to this today, 50 years later.
I liked this quote John Mashey, a computer scientist who...
Continuing my dive into the history of computers, I ran across this extended, detailed article covering the development and boom of the minicomputer industry.
An technical piece on restoring Alan Kay’s Xerox Alto he donated to Y Combinator. Amazing piece of technology history, and inspired so many future developments in computing — graphical user interfaces, WYSIWIG text editing, bitmapped graphics, the mouse, and Ethernet for connectivity.
A fun story from Jimmy Maher about the 1991 partnership with IBM that moved Apple from the Motorola 88000 chips to PowerPC. It was a savvy deal that kept the Macintosh (and Apple) alive and kicking long enough to bridge into their transition back to Steve Jobs’s leadership, and the eventual transition of the Mac lineup to Intel in 2006.
While the journalists reported and the pundits pontificated, it was up to the technical staff at Apple, IBM, and Motorola to make PowerPC computers a reality. Like their colleagues who had negotiated the deal, they all got along surprisingly...
One of the great things about YouTube is being able to find gems of history like Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos” presentation from 1968. How amazing it must’ve been to see something like this live, 50 years ago:
The live demonstration featured the introduction of a complete computer hardware and software system called the oN-Line System or, more commonly, NLS. The 90-minute presentation essentially demonstrated almost all the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision...
