jonjacky

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by jonjacky 5y ago
I would add London Lights: The Minds that Moved the City that Shook the World, 1805 - 1851 by James Hamilton, from 2007. It's about the whole scene including Ada and Babbage and many others -- where the worlds of science, the arts,
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by jonjacky 5y ago
Notable because this was one of the first descriptions of hacker culture when it appeared in 1976: "Wherever computer centers have become established, that is to say, in countless places in the United States, as well as in virtually al
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by jonjacky 5y ago
(1986)
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by jonjacky 5y ago
The obvious answer is Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs by Abelson and Sussman, often called SICP . It is often discussed on HN and is generally regarded as a classic with great staying power. It appeared in 1985 so it
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by jonjacky 5y ago
(2003)
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by jonjacky 5y ago
A Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake It https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11101358 From Feb 2016, with just 2 comments. The paper is much better than the comments would suggest.
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by jonjacky 5y ago
See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29803799 and the linked paper, which proposes DBOS: A DBMS-oriented Operating System, and describes a prototype. It has some similarities to the data center OS proposed in this post.
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by jonjacky 5y ago
SICP is known to be quite difficult - it was originally written for MIT students who also had college-level training in other math, science, and engineering subjects including calculus - as I recall SICP assumes you know something about the
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by jonjacky 5y ago
In 1959 LIFE magazine ran a pictorial feature on RAND, with pictures by the noted photographer Leonard McCombe. [1] Some pictures from the LIFE article appear in [2], pages 130 - 133. The pictures show RAND staff including nuclear strategi
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by jonjacky 5y ago
Many many suggestions two years ago in this Ask HN: Computer Science/History Books? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281
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by jonjacky 5y ago
As Jtsummers linked Wikipedia article explains, the term 'Think Tank' was originally applied to the RAND corporation, which was started by the Air Force in 1947 as an R&D organization within Douglas Aircraft, but soon became
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by jonjacky 5y ago
PS - If you are interested in drawing, you might look up books and especially pictures of ENIAC, often called the first electronic computer. It was programmed with patchcords so it's visually more interesting than all the gray boxes t
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by jonjacky 5y ago
The standard textbooks by historians are: A History of Modern Computing by Paul Ceruzzi Computer: A History of the Information Machine by Martin Campbell-Kelly and William Aspray There are good books by journalists and popular writers.
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by jonjacky 5y ago
That link didn't work for me: "Article identifier '0303352' not recognized" A working link, found by ArXiv search on the title, is: http://search.arxiv.org:8081/paper.jsp?r=math/0303352&qid
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by jonjacky 5y ago
Somerville was also a helpful influence in Ada's life, according to this passage in London Lights by James Hamilton, a fascinating book about scientists and artists on the London scene in those days: Ada Byron began to make a habit
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by jonjacky 5y ago
His autobiography Naturalist (1994) is a very readable introduction to his life and work -- and to his personality. He writes there about the controversies in his life, including his disputes at Harvard with his nemesis James Watson, and
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by jonjacky 5y ago
Algorithmics by David Harel is not much mentioned anymore, but it's really good if you can find it. An easy and inviting read, it was written as a popular book not a textbook but nevertheless covers many topics with very thorough an
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by jonjacky 5y ago
We had one of these at work. A friend observed, "It's silent when it's off."
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by jonjacky 5y ago
Essays, notes and memoirs going back to the 1950s by Norman Hardy, one of the developers of GNOSIS and its successor KeyKOS, at http://cap-lore.com/
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by jonjacky 5y ago
Title should include (2015) - the linked article shows that the word 'hypertext' was introduced in 1965, not 1971.
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by jonjacky 5y ago
These may be a bit far afield, but they are fun to watch anyway: The movies Singin' in the Rain (1952) and The Artist (2011) are both about response to technological change: the introduction of sound into the movies. The classic n
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by jonjacky 5y ago
Evgeny Morozov. His recent book To Save Everything, Click Here and earlier book The Net Delusion could be exactly what you are looking for. (I haven't read them myself, have only read reviews.) Seconding Shoshana Zuboff also. He
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by jonjacky 5y ago
It is. The expressions that look like this: (sys.lap-x86:xor32 :eax :eax) are assembly language statements.
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by jonjacky 5y ago
> Starting with a stripped-out Linux kernel and a standard toolchain (whether gcc or clang)... Harvey OS[1] is a Plan-9 based OS but with a modern toolchain using C11 and Go. Not much activity in the last few years, but then a burst o
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by jonjacky 5y ago
Another history is Dark Hero of the Information Age: In Search of Norbert Wiener, the Father of Cybernetics by Flo Conway and Jim Siegelman, from 2005.
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by jonjacky 5y ago
The nopsys/CogNOS project is more recent (commits in 2018): "CogNOS is actually a third iteration of the orginal SqueakNOS project ..." https://github.com/nopsys/CogNOS There is a conference paper about
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by jonjacky 5y ago
EPICS https://epics-controls.org/ "EPICS is a set of software tools and applications which provide a software infrastructure for use in building distributed control systems to operate devices such as Particle Accelerat
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by jonjacky 5y ago
There is a fascinating story behind this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20569438
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by jonjacky 5y ago
Phil Agre was a prolific writer with many high-quality contributions on a variety of topics. Here are some samples: How to help someone use a computer: https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html Ra
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by jonjacky 5y ago
I've never seen any 'extended punch card', or any machine that could punch a 132-column card. 132 was the line length of IBM line printers, imitated by many other popular brands, including Printronix and DEC. They printed on

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