Writing
Tagged “history”
22 articles
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The Sci-Fi Vision for AI
Science fiction has been writing about thinking machines for a century, and in 2024 the stories and the headlines have started to overlap. Where the fiction came from, what the real history looks like next to it, which…
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The Impact of William Gibson’s “Neuromancer” on Computer Science and the Internet
Neuromancer turned forty this month. It was written on a manual typewriter by a man who'd barely used a computer, and it gave the internet its vocabulary and its mood. What it got right, what it got hilariously wrong…
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The Importance of “The Hacker’s Manifesto” and Its Impact on Early Internet Culture
A teenager wrote it in a few hundred words just after his arrest, and Phrack published it in January 1986. "The Conscience of a Hacker" gave a scattered subculture an identity. Why it landed, what it got right about…
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The 4th of July and the Open Source Movement
Benjamin Franklin refused to patent his inventions and Thomas Jefferson wrote the best description of open source two centuries early. A short Independence Day piece on what the founders thought about ideas, and what…
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The History of Tux!
Linux's mascot lost every logo contest it entered, was drawn in a pre-1.0 release of the GIMP, and owes its existence to a zoo in Canberra and a claymation studio in Bristol. The real story of the penguin, and why a…
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The Birth of C and Its Relationship to Unix
C exists because Unix needed it, and Unix spread because C made it portable. How a language built for one minicomputer became the foundation of nearly every operating system, why it won, and why the White House spent…
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The History of AMD64 aka x86-64
Intel planned to take the PC to 64 bits with Itanium, a clean break from x86. AMD bolted 64 bits onto x86 instead, and won so completely that Intel had to license its rival's design. How that happened, what AMD64…
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The History of ARM Architecture
A two-person design team at a British home computer maker built a processor so frugal it ran on leakage current. Forty years later its descendants are in nearly every phone on Earth, Amazon's data centers and, as of…
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The History of Unix and Its Relationship to Linux
Unix was written in a month on a cast-off minicomputer, spread because an antitrust ruling stopped AT&T from selling it, and splintered the moment AT&T could. Linux shares none of its code and most of its ideas. How the…
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The History of x86 Architecture
The 8086 was meant to be a stopgap. Forty-six years later its instruction set runs most of the world's servers and PCs, carrying every decision ever made about it. How a rushed 16-bit chip outlived everything designed…