[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
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Ask HN: Best way to learn about computing history?
I'm a software engineer, mainly working on mobile apps (iOS
primarily) through React Native and some Swift/Java. I have a CS
degree and about 7 years in this field. However recently I've
become very aware that JS/TS and Swift etc are just APIs on top of
APIs. I've been drawn to learning more about how computers work,
the history of programming/computers (Unix, Sinclair, commodore,
etc and even going back to Ada Lovelace, Babbage and mainframes in
the 1950s) and things like memory allocation. I've tried learning
some BASIC and Assembly code but haven't really got very far. I
read/devour articles on sites like https://twobithistory.org but
they only get you so far. What can I do to help accelerate this
and satiate this desire to learn more about how computers work? I
live in London, UK and would be happy to spend some money on a uni
course or something if there was a good one. I learn best
practically so like to be "doing" something as well as theory.
Author : Tmkly
Score : 143 points
Date : 2022-04-20 11:32 UTC (2 days ago)
| ravenstine wrote:
| Though it doesn't cover all of computing history, this site is a
| comprehensive timeline of personal computing history from 1947 to
| now.
|
| https://kpolsson.com/comphist/
|
| Apparently the author has been maintaining that timeline since
| 1995 and is still doing it!
|
| While it doesn't cover things like computer science, I think it's
| an excellent jumping off point for learning about notable people
| and events.
|
| Not exactly what you asked for, but you may also be interested
| and may give you some insight I think more programmers should
| have.
|
| EDIT: Also, don't stop at Babbage & Lovelace. Although Babbage's
| analytical engine was one of the first, if not the first
| programmable computers with a form of memory, there were people
| working on extremely primitive computers (or rather advanced
| calculators) way before Babbage. Schickard, Pascal, and Leibniz
| conceived of and developed calculating engines that did basic
| math with support for interim value storage, which one might
| consider to be the earliest form of computer memory.
| evo_9 wrote:
| Worth finding and watching is the three-part PBS series called
| Triumph of the Nerds hosted by Robert X Cringley.
|
| It covers the rise of the PC up until the early 90s and has
| interviews of everybody including Bill Gates Steve Jobs Larry
| Ellison etc. etc.... It's pretty amazing.
| ev0lv wrote:
| My HS teacher made a pretty good high level video on computing
| history. I recommend starting there.
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MZ3tSPF83yo
| jll29 wrote:
| 1. Visit Bletchley Park and the attached computer history museum.
|
| 2. Check out a recent computing history book like: Thomas Haigh
| and Paul E. Ceruzzi (2021) A New History of Modern Computing,
| Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press.
| machiaweliczny wrote:
| My practical recommendations: * understand
| brainfuck or so called RAM machine as simplest computer *
| read 50 pages of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code:_The_Hidden
| _Language_of_Computer_Hardware_and_Software * read
| https://www.bottomupcs.com/ to understand low level stuff *
| Learn some C
|
| To understand computation I think scheme or lambda calculus is
| the best. Don't know good intro.
|
| Bear in mind that what we have is just certain
| implementation/abstraction for computation that's likely still
| suboptimal. That's why people come with new languages/VMs. I
| wonder if some alternative to RAM machine exists. I've heard
| about lisp machines...
| robotguy wrote:
| Ben Eater's Youtube series "Building an 8-bit Breadboard
| Computer" is a really good introduction to the lowest levels of
| how a computer works:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLowKtXNTBypGqImE405J2...
|
| I recommended it to my daughter when she was taking a class in R
| and asked "But how does the COMPUTER know what to do?"
| Tmkly wrote:
| this looks extremely interesting and may be just what I'm
| after. I have some basic electronics experience so I could
| build on that too. Thanks!
| thamer wrote:
| Ben Eater also sells a kit for those who want to follow along
| by building their own: https://eater.net/shop
| rschachte wrote:
| Shout out to Ben Eater. This dude explains how the internet
| works and rips open an Ethernet cable and hooks up an
| oscilloscope to it and decodes the bits that transfer over the
| physical cable.
|
| Very informative!
| Banana699 wrote:
| >But how does the COMPUTER know what to do?
|
| Ben Eater is amazing, but his series in my very humble opinion
| isn't the best answer to this question. I found the emphasis on
| the breadboard and the particulars of physical implementation
| getting in the way of a clean pedagogical introduction to logic
| circuits as a DAG of abstract computational elements
| implementing function from {0,1}^n -> {0,1}^m (which we then
| implement with real circuits in whatever medium and form we
| choose), it's very "DIY" and maker-oriented in nature. This
| doesn't negate it's status as a masterpiece of educational
| vlogs, I just feel it leaves a first-time learner hanging on
| some very important questions.
|
| The single best answer I have ever seen to this question is the
| outstanding _The Elements Of Computing Systems_ [1], better
| known as the NandToTetris course[2][3]. You literally start
| with Nand and build a computer, an assembler, a VM, a compiler,
| a simple runtime library, and - finally - Tetris running on top
| of all that. It's one of the best introductions to computers
| and computer science I have ever seen in my life, at once a
| textbook and a work of science communication. It comes with
| it's own software suit[4], and the first 4 chapters of the book
| (from Nand to a fully functional computer capable of running
| machine code) are gamified in [5].
|
| [1] https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/elements-computing-systems
|
| [2] https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrDd_kMiAuNmSb-
| CKWQqq...
|
| [3]
| https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLrDd_kMiAuNmllp9vuPqC...
|
| [4] https://www.nand2tetris.org/software
|
| [5] https://nandgame.com/
| louwrentius wrote:
| Offtopic: Reminds me that Ben Eater has gone 100% silent since
| last november (hope he is ok)
| simonebrunozzi wrote:
| Obligatory mention: "Secret History of Silicon Valley" by Steve
| Blank [0].
|
| [0]: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
| davidf18 wrote:
| scp3125 wrote:
| It's tangential, but "Where Wizards Stay Up Late: The Origins of
| the Internet" by Katie Hafner and Matthew Lyon is one of my
| favorite books on the foundations of the Internet.
| robintw wrote:
| I came here to post this - fascinating book, which I loved.
| jonjacky wrote:
| Many many suggestions two years ago in this Ask HN: Computer
| Science/History Books?
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22692281
| DontMindit wrote:
| If you wish to learn how COMPUTING works not computers.... then
| Rosens book on Discrete Mathematics is the MASTER KEY
| vincent-manis wrote:
| I'm not at all sure that learning about computer history and
| learning about how computers work are the same thing. For
| example, looking at early microprocessors would give you the idea
| that instruction set architectures are completely random when in
| fact their designers were faced with a limited transistor budget
| and very short development times. Often, microprocessors were
| offered as a replacement for discrete logic, rather than as
| generally programmable computing devices.
|
| The history of computing is replete with really dumb ideas, from
| addition and multiplication tables in memory (IBM 1620) to
| processors optimized for Ada that ran too slowly to be useful
| (Intel iAPX 432). There were really smart ideas, too, such as
| cache (IBM System/360 Model 85) and RISC (too many systems to
| mention). What you want is just the smart ideas, I'd say.
|
| If you want to get an understanding of how modern computers work,
| and given your CS degree, I would recommend David Patterson/John
| Hennessy's Computer Organization and Design, any edition. A lot
| of universities use this book in a second-year architecture
| course.
|
| In terms of relating this information to the overall hierarchy of
| computer systems, I would also recommend Nisan and Schocken's
| Elements of Computing Systems.
| TheOtherHobbes wrote:
| Lookup tables are a good way to do fast arithmetic. Some IEEE
| 754 implementations still use them - usually with interpolation
| - for certain functions.
|
| That aside - hardware technologies, storage systems, ISAs,
| engineering enhancements (like paging, caches, microcode, and
| others), operating systems, market segmentation (micro, mini,
| super, etc), languages, and compiler theory all have their own
| separate histories.
|
| You don't need to know the histories to write good code, but
| they're all interesting in their own right.
|
| All the book suggestions here are good, but I'd also recommend
| a rummage through the huge bitsavers computing archive
| (http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/) for first hand notes, memos,
| and documents from a huge selection of manufacturers and
| facilities.
|
| It's a bit of a disorganised grab bag with a fair amount of
| noise, but the IBM, DEC, Burroughs, CDC and various university
| archives have some fascinating material.
| vincent-manis wrote:
| One thing I learned from 30 years doing university-level
| teaching is that if you throw a grab bag at people, most of
| them won't learn much of anything. That's why university
| courses (and good textbooks) tend to impose a bit of
| structure on what's to be learned. My advice: pick one or two
| books from the plethora mentioned in this thread, and work
| your way through them. Once you have built a mental model of
| the particular topic areas you want to understand, then you
| can start widening your search.
|
| As for lookup tables, I won't say anything bad about them in
| general. That said, if you pressed the Memory Clear button on
| a 1620 console, it would wipe the addition and multiplication
| tables, meaning you couldn't even load a program until you
| had manually entered replacement values. This was a Dumb Idea
| :).
| uticus wrote:
| To the point of the original question, _Patterson & Hennessy_
| includes a bit on history at the end of every chapter.
| srvmshr wrote:
| I think the way to go about it is read some books gradually on
| history of computing & the various designs and rationale that
| evolved over time. Consider these sources:
|
| 1. The Annotated Turing.
|
| 2. A History of Modern Computing 3ed
|
| 3. The ACM Turing award lectures
|
| 4. Theory of computation - Dexter Kozen
|
| 5. Coders at Work
|
| 6. Hackers: Heroes of the computer revolution
|
| Additionally, you could subscribe to _Communications of ACM_ ,
| which is a computing oriented monthly magazine.
| omeze wrote:
| A History of Modern Computing is great
|
| Would add:
|
| - How The Internet Happened (history of the internet)
|
| - To The Digital Age (transistor history)
| Tmkly wrote:
| these look good, thanks!
| mandeepj wrote:
| > I've become very aware that JS/TS and Swift etc are just APIs
| on top of APIs.
|
| I'd call them abstractions. This is how it's - high level
| programming languages (C#) are just abstractions so that we don't
| have to remember machine instructions. Similar to a name in
| Contacts connecting to a phone number; the former is far easy to
| remember.
| kwatsonafter wrote:
| Ted Nelson's YouTube channel:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson
|
| It's also worth looking at:
| https://www.youtube.com/user/yoshikiohshima. There's a goldmine
| of talks by people like Alan Kay and Seymour Papert. An important
| question to ask when, "probing" the literature-- why are
| computers the way they are in terms of human-computer interaction
| and human culture? What is a, "computer" without making an appeal
| to mathematical concepts like Turing Machines/Lambda Calculus?
| What are the major, "paradigm shifts" that gave us GUIs, mice,
| ect...?
|
| It's worth noting that the history of popular computers parallels
| almost exactly the neoliberal economic period. Atari was founded
| in 1972. Look into the Mansfield Amendment and ARPA. Try to get
| past a cultural myth that computer companies started in, "normal"
| people's garages. Try to see past the, "present concept." Alan
| Kay has famously said, "The computer revolution hasn't happened
| yet." It's up to the current/future generations to, "really"
| define what computers are in terms of human culture. Think,
| "living history." Think, "world before-after the invention of the
| Gutenberg printing press."
|
| https://www.nsf.gov/nsb/documents/2000/nsb00215/nsb50/1970/m...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart
|
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
| digisign wrote:
| Was just showing the subject to a youngster recently. Other folks
| mentioned the Code book, I liked that one. The MMM by Brooks of
| course. We also looked at the following videos on youtube/Kanopy
| and other places:
|
| - The Story of Math(s) by Marcus du Sautoy to set the stage...
| school and taxes in ancient Sumeria, Fibonacci bringing Indian
| numbers to Europe, and other fascinating subjects.
|
| - We watched short biographies of Babbage and Lovelace, full-
| length ones of Turing and Von Neumann. The "code breakers" of
| WWII.
|
| - Top Secret Rosies: The Female "Computers" of WWII, another good
| one.
|
| - There's more history in PBS' Crash Course Computer science,
| than you might expect. It is great although so peppy we had to
| watch at .9x with newpipe. Shows relays, vacuum tubes, to ICs, to
| the Raspberry Pi. As well as the logic gates they model.
|
| - "The Professor" at Computerphile is a great story teller about
| the early days.
|
| - There are great videos about CTSS being developed at MIT I
| think, where they are designing an operating system via paper
| terminal and trying to decide on how to partition the
| memory/storage: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q07PhW5sCEk
|
| - The Introducing Unix videos by ATT are straight from the
| source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tc4ROCJYbm0
|
| - The movie/book "Hidden Figures" touches on this time as well.
| Facing obsolescence by IBM, one of the characters teaches herself
| Fortran.
|
| - The Pirates of Silicon Valley is a fun dramatization of the
| late 70s to 80s PC industry. It specifically calls out the
| meeting between MS and IBM as _the deal of the century._ We also
| watched a "Berkeley in '68" doc on Kanopy to set the stage
| before this one. Interesting, but a tangent.
|
| - The "8-bit Guy" is also great, he dissects and rebuilds old
| home computer hardware from the same era, and teaches their
| history as he does it. Even his tangential videos on why there
| are no more electronics stores (besides Apple) in malls is great.
|
| - There are good docs on the "dead ends" of the industry as well,
| such as "General Magic" and "Silicon Cowboys."
|
| - "Revolution OS" a doc about the beginnings of FLOSS and Linux.
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| You may find the history of the first large-scale digital
| computer interesting.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Colossus-secrets-Bletchley-code-break...
|
| It was used by the British to break the Lorenz cipher (which the
| Nazis used to encrypt high-level strategic communications.)
| eigenvalue wrote:
| I think the best way to learn this stuff is from the people who
| did it, speaking in their own words. But watching videos takes
| forever, so the best way to do this is to read oral histories.
| The Computer History Museum has really great content-- I've read
| dozens of these. You can easily find them, ranking in approximate
| order of popularity, with the following google search:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=oral+history+computer+museum...
|
| To find more (and there are many great ones outside of the
| Museum), you can try a broader search:
|
| https://www.google.com/search?q=oral+history+arpa+filetype%3...
|
| I have found that I can read around 3-5x faster than listening to
| people talk, depending on the speed of the speaker (most of the
| people interviewed in these oral histories are quite old and can
| speak a bit slower), and I also retain the information much
| better. There is something about reading an actual conversation
| by someone who was there when this stuff was being invented (or
| literally invented it themselves) that you don't get from reading
| a retrospective historical account, and it makes the information
| stick with you more, since it's all framed in stories and
| personal accounts.
|
| Some favorites:
|
| https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107503/oh...
|
| https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
|
| https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107247/oh...
|
| https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Hist...
|
| http://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/text/Oral_Histo...
|
| https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107613/oh...
|
| https://digitalassets.lib.berkeley.edu/roho/ucb/text/valenti...
|
| https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/107642/oh...
|
| There are so many other good ones, but that's a good start!
| peterkos wrote:
| On the more "history" side of things -- Podcasts!
|
| My very first introduction to anything "old" tech was through the
| TechStuff podcast[0] (re: 2011-era episodes, so sort by oldest).
|
| More recently the On The Metal podcast[1] has been a really cool
| deep dive into old tech history, especially the episode (season
| 2) with John Graham Cumming.
|
| About implementations, my first real playing around with assembly
| was "Learn TI-83 Plus Assembly in 28 days"[2].
|
| [0]: https://player.fm/series/techstuff-2152808
|
| [1]: https://oxide.computer/podcasts
|
| [2]: https://tutorials.eeems.ca/ASMin28Days/welcome.html
| bingaling wrote:
| The 1992 WGBH/BBC 5-part miniseries "The Machine That Changed The
| World"(US)/"The Dream Machine"(UK):
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Machine_That_Changed_the_W...
|
| is out of print, but can be found intermittently on youtube.
|
| I love the coverage of 1940's computing, with interviews with
| several of the surviving people:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konrad_Zuse
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ENIAC
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eckert%E2%80%93Mauchly_Compute...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EDSAC
|
| Currently working episode links:
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hayi9AsDXDo
|
| 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GropWVbj9wA
|
| 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTLgAI3G_rs
|
| 4: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E1zbCU5JnE0
|
| 5: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuxYUJv2Jd4
| Jtsummers wrote:
| So your title and comment suggest two slightly different things.
| For "how computers work?" I recommend _Code_ by Petzold (higher
| level, good book) and _The Elements of Computing Systems_ by
| Nisan and Schocken (also available here:
| https://www.nand2tetris.org/). The latter is project based and
| has you develop a computer starting at NAND gates and working up.
| It can be run through at a good clip while still learning a lot
| if you're a moderately experienced developer.
|
| EDIT: Per Amazon there's a second edition of _Code_ coming out at
| some point, but no date that I 've been able to find.
|
| I've also got a copy of, but not yet read, _Ideas That Created
| the Future: Classic Papers of Computer Science_ edited by Harry
| R. Lewis, the contents are in chronological order with the most
| recent in 1979. It has 46 different papers on computing, being
| largely historical this ought to be a decent starting point as
| well.
| leohonexus wrote:
| I'd also add the book "But How Do It Know?" from J. Clark Scott
| as a fantastic primer, building from gates to RAM and CPU, to a
| simple bootloader and assembly programming. It comes with a CPU
| simulator on the book's website so you could make sense of what
| you're learning - and being a light read you could reasonably
| finish it in a week.
|
| http://www.buthowdoitknow.com
| Tmkly wrote:
| yeah I'm not entirely sure what I want. Thanks for these
| suggestions, will take a look. nand2tetris looks cool!
| swagtricker wrote:
| If you want pacing & support for Nand2Tetris, Coursera has it
| split into two courses. I've done the first from NAND gates
| to a working CUP & assembler and can testify it's worthy.
| Coursera loves to have content sales, so if you're not in a
| rush you can pick it up for cheap and have their (petty yet
| ego boosting) certificate of completion to read over one
| morning with you Cheerios (and then put away in a drawer to
| be forgotten). Here's the two links:
|
| Part I - https://www.coursera.org/learn/build-a-computer Part
| II - https://www.coursera.org/learn/nand2tetris2
|
| Some day I hope to pick up Part II, but Part I was still a
| lot of fun!
| echoradio wrote:
| "How Computers Really Work" by Matthew Justice. [1]
|
| I enjoyed this book because every chapter includes hands-on
| hardware and software experiments for you to see the concept
| described in action.
|
| [1] https://www.howcomputersreallywork.com/
| NuSkooler wrote:
| Maybe not exactly what you're looking for, but Xibalba BBS
| (https://xibalba.l33t.codes for a web UI) hosts a ton of articles
| on computing history in the files section.
| SilasX wrote:
| Just to piggyback on, I'd be interested in the pre-computer
| history of computing. That is, a survey of how they handled all
| the computation problems before (electronic) computers. Like,
| storing large amounts of data, having "databases" that need to
| answer queries over a large geographic area, how they replicated
| "databases", how they indexed information, how they did backups,
| and so on.
| PAPPPmAc wrote:
| Michael R. Williams' "A History of Computing Technology" (
| ISBN-13: 978-0818677397 ) talks a lot about pre-electronic-
| computer technologies and techniques for calculation and
| information management.
|
| It's a solid suggestion for history of computing books in
| general. I like it better in several ways than the more common
| Ceruzzi book (especially because it starts much earlier and
| situates better), but it hasn't been updated since 1997 and
| some things, especially in the more recent history, are
| understood differently now than at the time it was written.
| SilasX wrote:
| Thanks for the suggestion, I'll take a look!
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| _Turing 's Cathedral_ by George Dyson is a good source on the
| history and development of computation in the 1930s through to
| the 50s. It's very centred on the work that was done at Princeton
| by Von Neumann et al [1] and lacks coverage of important work
| that was going on at the same time in Germany, the UK, and other
| places.
|
| You _might_ want to look into how the idea of computation came
| out of mathematical work in the early twentieth century. _The
| Annotated Turing_ by Charles Petzold is good if you 're up for
| some maths.
|
| Aerospace and spaceflight were some of the first activities that
| required large-scale software development. You could check-out
| _Starburst and Luminary_ by Don Eyles and _Digital Apollo_ by
| David Mindell.
|
| [1] The author's father was Freman Dyson who was at the Institute
| for Advanced Study (at Princeton) with Einstein, Godel and
| others.
| psahgal wrote:
| I have a bachelor's in Computer Engineering from University of
| Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and several of my courses covered
| how computers work in detail!
|
| - ECE 190 and ECE 290 covered basic programming, logic gates, and
| the basics of software processor architecture.
|
| - ECE 391 (one of the hardest courses in the school) covered x86
| assembly and operating system design. The capstone project for
| the course was to build a simple OS with terminal input.
|
| - ECE 411 covered processor architecture in detail, and how a
| modern x86 processor is built.
|
| There should be courses from other universities that cover the
| same topics. Here's some similar courses I found on MIT's
| OpenCourseware platform.
|
| - Computation Structures covers logic gates and other standard
| electronic constructs.
| https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-004-computation-structures-spr...
|
| - Operating Systems Engineering covers fundamentals of operating
| system design: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-828-operating-
| system-engineeri...
|
| Best of luck!
| photochemsyn wrote:
| This site has a nice timeline of computer development history
| dating back to the 1930s:
|
| https://www.computerhistory.org/timeline/computers/
| d136o wrote:
| I love this question because I've also been fascinated with the
| history of the field, some suggestions below.
|
| From September 2021:
|
| A new history of modern computing
|
| https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/new-history-modern-computing
|
| Skip around it's various chapters, it's fun of little details.
|
| Also a fun read, this old article about the silicon in Silicon
| Valley, it's from a long dead magazine and it's titled They Would
| be Gods:
|
| https://www.dropbox.com/s/l9mi2aqnyf5fp3l/They%20Would%20Be%...
|
| Lastly, the part I enjoyed the most of Walter Isaacsons bio on
| Jobs, was the adjacent history.
| ivan_ah wrote:
| IEEE has a special interest group called Silicon Valley
| Technology History Committee, which regularly hosts
| talks/discussions: https://r6.ieee.org/sv-
| techhistory/?page_id=320
|
| Here is an example link from a recent session on the history of
| Ethernet networking standard: [ Ethernet's Emergence from Xerox
| PARC: 1975-1980 ] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVEcqZnGya0
| devmunchies wrote:
| The Acquired podcast is really good. Both speakers have CS
| degrees but are VCs now. Learned a ton from the TSMC, NVIDIA,
| Sony, A16Z, Epic, and Sequoia episodes.
| als0 wrote:
| If you can manage a day trip to Cambridge (about an hour from
| London), you should visit the excellent Museum of Computing
| History http://www.computinghistory.org.uk/
| cameronh90 wrote:
| National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park is also
| excellent.
| chr15p wrote:
| Seconded (thirded? fourthed?)
|
| I'd also add the Information Age gallery at the Science
| Museum in London, which covers from the telegraph to Arm and
| the modern day, its aimed at a more mainstream audience than
| Bletchley but is free and well worth a look.
| khaledh wrote:
| I have the same passion about computing history. I can't count
| the amount of literature I've read to learn about this
| fascinating history; it's very satisfying to know when, how,
| where, and by who original work was done to advance computing.
| Most of the foundational work in computer architecture and
| computer science was done in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. From there it
| has been incremental improvements.
|
| I highly recommend reading "The Dream Machine" by Mitchell
| Waldrop. It's very well written, and covers a huge swath of
| computing history, from the ENIAC to the Internet (it was written
| in 2000).
|
| Instead of recommending specific sources (too many), I can
| mention key milestones in computing history that you may want to
| research:
|
| - Theory of computation (Alan Turing, Alonzo Church)
|
| - Early binary systems (John Atanasoff, Konrad Zuse, George
| Stibitz, Claude Shannon)
|
| - Early computers (ABC, ENIAC, EDSAC, EDVAC, Von Neumann
| architecture)
|
| - Early programming (Assembly language, David Wheeler, Nathaniel
| Rochester)
|
| - Early interactive computing (MIT Whirlwind, SAGE, TX-0, TX-2)
|
| - Early mainframes (UNIVAC, IBM 70x series)
|
| - Early programming languages (Speedcoding, Autocode, A-0, A-2,
| MATH-MATIC, FLOW-MATIC)
|
| - First programming languages (FORTRAN, COBOL, LISP, ALGOL)
|
| - Early operating systems (GM-NAA I/O, BESYS, SOS, IBSYS, FMS)
|
| - Early time-sharing system (MIT CTSS, Multics, DTSS, Berkeley
| TSS, IBM CP-67)
|
| - Early Virtual Memory (Atlas, Burroughs MCP)
|
| - Early minicomputers (DEC PDP line)
|
| - Mainframe operating systems (IBM OS/360, UNIVAC EXEC)
|
| - Early online transaction processing (SABRE, IBM ACP/TPF)
|
| - Early work on concurrency (Edsger Dijkstra, C.A.R. Hoare, Per
| Birch Hansen)
|
| - Early database systems (GE IDS, IBM IMS, CODASYL)
|
| - Early Object-Oriented Programming (Simula I, Simula 67,
| Smalltalk)
|
| - More programming languages (CPL, BCPL, B, C, BASIC, PL/I)
|
| - Mini/Supermini operating systems (Tenex, TOPS-20, VMS)
|
| - Structured Programming (Pascal, Modula, Niklaus Wirth)
|
| - Relational data model and SQL (Codd, Chamberlin, Boyce)
|
| I could keep going on, but this is already too long. I hope this
| at least puts your feet on the first steps.
| spogbiper wrote:
| The Advent of Computing podcast may be of interest. The host
| really strives to find accurate historical information about a
| variety of early computing topics.
|
| https://adventofcomputing.com/
|
| It's also fairly entertaining
| type0 wrote:
| That's been one of my favorite tech podcasts, for sure one of
| the gems.
| ModernMech wrote:
| I did a quick search and I didn't see HOPL mentioned (History of
| Programming Languages). You can learn a lot about this history of
| computing in general by going through that workshop series. HOPL
| IV was just last year and had some great talks.
| https://hopl4.sigplan.org
| krallja wrote:
| The textbooks I used in university were "From Airline
| Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software
| Industry" (Campbell-Kelly) and "A History of Modern Computing
| (second edition)" (Ceruzzi). There is a brand-new update to the
| second one, "A New History of Modern Computing" (Haigh/Ceruzzi)
| that I'm looking forward to reading this summer.
| m1keil wrote:
| One resource I stumbled upon was The Dream Machine book. Very
| broad historic overview of computing history throughout last 70
| years or so.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| If you like podcasts, there is Advent of Computing. It's not
| chronological, instead covering a different topic every episode.
| Most recent episodes are about magnetic core memory, INTERCAL, a
| hypertext system developed by the US military, and the Analytical
| Engine, respectively. There's over 80 episodes now so there's a
| lot to learn about.
|
| Website: https://adventofcomputing.com/ RSS:
| https://adventofcomputing.libsyn.com/rss
|
| If you want an idea of how computers work, there are toy virtual
| machines that are a good teaching tool
| (https://peterhigginson.co.uk/RISC/).
| shreyshnaccount wrote:
| A tangent, but you might find interesting starting points from
| the nand2tetis course. ( www.nand2tetris.org) And reading seminal
| papers by the likes of Turing and Church
| Phithagoras wrote:
| From a NAND gate to Tetris was excellent. Informative and obvious
|
| https://www.nand2tetris.org/
| naikrovek wrote:
| I cannot endorse this enough.
|
| some of it is hard and will have you wondering if you want to
| continue. if you do, and I highly recommend that every
| developer complete this course, you will find yourself thinking
| in new ways and understanding many problems very differently,
| which is a very good thing.
|
| and you will see huge performance problems in almost all
| software from them on, because none of this (I gesture vaguely
| at everything everywhere) should be as slow as it is. none of
| it.
| SilasX wrote:
| Agreed. For me, the course was eerily able to hit my exact
| sweet spot of difficulty. Almost every project had me in the
| "I'm about to give up" stage just long enough before I had a
| breakthrough and kept continuing.
|
| >and you will see huge performance problems in almost all
| software from them on, because none of this (I gesture
| vaguely at everything everywhere) should be as slow as it is.
| none of it.
|
| Hah! Yes! After finishing, the first optimization I made was
| to add an "inc" command to the high-level (Java-like)
| language you implement. It annoyed me that any time you have
| "i = i + 1", it translates into VM code of "push 1 onto
| stack, push i's value onto stack, add, pop stack to i's
| location", each of which translates into several machine
| instructions. Especially given that the CPU has an increment
| instruction!
|
| So I added the inc keyword that would ensure you bypass all
| of that, if you just want to increment a variable, and thus
| use significantly fewer cycles. It was really thrilling
| (well, as much as a technical project can be) to have the
| level of insight and control needed to make a change like
| that.
| krallja wrote:
| The game inspired by the course is great, too:
| https://nandgame.com/
| Jach wrote:
| For "how things work", I recommend the book _Code_ by Charles
| Petzold. After that, Jon Stokes 's _Inside the Machine_ will give
| a lot of details on CPU architectures up to Intel 's Core 2 Duo.
| You can also try following along a computer engineering book if
| you want to go that low in detail with exercises, _Digital
| Fundamentals_ by Floyd is a common textbook (I have an old 8th
| edition).
|
| History-wise, enjoy learning slowly because there's so much that
| even if you dedicated yourself to it you wouldn't be "done" any
| time soon! Some suggestions in order though:
|
| Watching _The Mother of All Demos_ :
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yJDv-zdhzMY
|
| A short clip of Sketchpad presented by Alan Kay:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=495nCzxM9PI
|
| An article from the 40s that also inspired Engelbart:
| https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-m...
|
| _The Information_ by James Gleick
|
| _What the Dormouse Said_ by John Markoff
|
| _The Psychology of Computer Programming_ by Gerald Weinberg
|
| Lastly, to mix up in whatever order you please, some paper
| collections:
|
| _Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective_ edited by
| Andreas Paepcke
|
| History of Programming Languages papers for various langs you're
| interested in, here's the set from the second conference in 1993
| https://dl.acm.org/doi/proceedings/10.1145/154766 but there have
| been further conferences to check out too if it's interesting
|
| Also all of the Turing Award winners' lectures I've read have
| been good https://amturing.acm.org/lectures.cfm
|
| All that and some good recommendations others have given should
| keep you busy for a while!
| sk1pper wrote:
| In the vein of learning how computers work, osdev has got to be
| pretty high up there. It's so much fun - it has become my hobby.
| I'm surprised no one else seems to have mentioned it.
|
| I just finished implementing a really basic network stack for my
| x86 kernel, including a (crappy) driver for the RTL 8139 network
| card. I just learned a ton about how the internet works. I
| learned it all in college, but there's something different about
| grappling with it directly.
|
| And I've gotten pretty good at C in the meantime. I've also
| learned a ton about virtual memory, page tables, system calls,
| various hardware, how data is stored on disk, the ELF file
| format, how processes are loaded and executed, the x86 calling
| convention, a little bit of assembly code, just to name a few.
|
| Check out https://wiki.osdev.org for where to start. I'm hoping
| to start writing some blog posts about all of this soon, to
| provide a resource to complement the osdev wiki. A lot of info on
| this is surprisingly hard to dig up.
| RugnirViking wrote:
| There are also several good museums dedicated to the subject. I
| used to work for the national museum of computing at bletchley
| park in the UK, and there they have a lot of good exhibits that
| teach basics of how computers and networking works and has
| evolved over the years.
|
| Another good approach one can take to learn is starting with a
| simple system with well-defined rules, and making a simple
| computer out of it. Many people do this in minecraft, for myself
| it was boolean functions in excel. You can and should look many
| things up during this process, fail and rework designs several
| times etc. Learning how logic gates work, then scaling the
| knowledge up to bit adders, registers, ALU, making a cpu
| instruction set and starting on basic turing machine architecture
| is a very rewarding hobby and is definately the best way to get
| low-level knowledge
| Tmkly wrote:
| I've been meaning to visit Bletchley! thanks, these suggestions
| are helpful
| RugnirViking wrote:
| if you do go, my favorite exhibit at Bletchley is the Harwell
| Dekatron a.k.a WITCH. It's a really good machine for learning
| how computers work, both because its so early meaning it has
| simple architecture, but also for other reasons:
|
| It uses base 10 instead of base 2 to store values in its
| memory, so doing the calculations in your head is a lot
| easier
|
| It's memory is made from special tubes that have a orange
| glow at one of 10 positions, meaning you can see the contents
| of the computer's memory in its entirety just by looking at
| the machine.
|
| Building off the previous point, you can see the cpu
| register, which is a single small piece of memory that stores
| the current data to be modified, which again with the lit-up
| memory means you can see what the computer is doing at any
| givenm time.
|
| Finally, the computer has a debugging switch which can pause
| and step forwards through each instruction the computer is
| performing, as well as a more granular mode that lets you
| step through individual parts of an operation (for example
| each digit being added in a adding operation separately)
|
| It's not always running but if you go I hope you get to see
| it :)
|
| EDIT: oh and I suppose I should mention there is more than
| one museum at bletchley, there is the big one that focuses on
| ww2, but the museum of computing is tucked away to the side a
| bit.
| pxeger1 wrote:
| If you go to Bletchley Park, don't go on a hot day in summer!
| Those old machines massively heat up the room.
| bin_bash wrote:
| I second Bletchley. Consider it your obligatory pilgrimage as a
| computing professional.
| mprovost wrote:
| They're just opening a new exhibit in Block A next week!
| bin_bash wrote:
| Sounds like I need to make another Hajj then.
| smackeyacky wrote:
| Youtube "The computer chronicles"
|
| Fascinating show, mostly about micros but featuring early
| industry legend Gary Kildall.
|
| The software reviews are hilarious. The predictions of the future
| of computing always wrong. The guests demoing stuff always cut
| off as soon as it gets interesting.
|
| I started programming as a teenager in that era but never saw the
| show in period. For me its eye opening just how amateur the
| industry really was. The show is unintentionally funny now, but
| really gives a great idea of the time period.
| themadturk wrote:
| Steven Levy's _Hackers_ is a foundational work of the history of
| computing. Levy spends a lot of time on the MIT hackers of the
| 1960s and 1970s, the group that hatched Lisp, Richard Stallman
| and the free software movement, and also a lot of time on the Bay
| Area hackers that kick-started the microcomputer revolution.
| Certainly it 's not a comprehensive guide to the full range of
| computing history, but it's an important and engaging look the
| beginnings of where we are today.
| eigenvalue wrote:
| I second that, Hackers was a great read. I read it back in the
| late 90s and then again a couple years ago and was surprised
| how much of it came back to me. He's one of the few tech
| journalists and writers who actually gets it.
| [deleted]
| gravypod wrote:
| A great summary, from someone who was influential in web
| technologies, can be found in this series "Crockford on
| JavaScript":
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxAXlJEmNMg&list=PL766437924...
|
| (context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Crockford)
| 89vision wrote:
| https://oxide.computer/podcasts
|
| This podcast is everything
| denvaar wrote:
| PBS made a "crash course" computer science series that covers a
| lot of topics
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tpIctyqH29Q&list=PLH2l6uzC4U...
| netsharc wrote:
| A long while ago I found the Jargon File, it's a "dictionary" of
| terms used by hackers as the culture was budding at the
| universities in the 70's. Reading the entries you get a glimpse
| of the technology and culture of those places at that time. Young
| me found it really cool in a nerdy way, and read all the entries
| from front to back. Since this was before the always online
| times, I was just reading the TXT file from http://jargon-
| file.org/archive/ rather than needing to navigate the many pages:
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/
| Tmkly wrote:
| that's great, will take a look. thanks
| arman_ashrafian wrote:
| "The Dream Machine" by M. Mitchell Waldrop.
|
| It tells the history of computing by following J.C.R Licklider.
| As one of the directors of ARPA, he was responsible for funding
| research labs to work on computer research. He had a major impact
| on which projects got funded, and in-turn which systems are now
| being used 60 years later. I honestly love this book so much. If
| you love computers and history, its a must-read.
| ecliptik wrote:
| I haven't read it, but heard good things about "The Soul of a New
| Machine" about Data Generals efforts create a new 32-bit
| superminicomputer.
|
| https://www.tracykidder.com/the-soul-of-a-new-machine.html
|
| Another comment mentioned "Pirates of Silicon Valley" as a good
| dramatization of MS/Apple and there's also the miniseries "Valley
| of the Boom" about the rise and fall of Netscape and "Halt and
| Catch Fire" which is a fictional and thematic view of 80s/90s
| computer history.
| wantoncl wrote:
| Soul of a New Machine is absolutely classic. You'll learn just
| how much, and how little, computers and programming have
| changed since the 70s. And some interesting takes on
| microcoding, if you're already dealing with APIs on APIs,
| you'll get a better understanding.
|
| If you want some Apple history, particularly on the early days
| of Macintosh, check out folklore.org. DO NOT start reading it
| if you have anything important to do for the next 24 hours.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| Maybe buy a raspberry pi pico and code it in assembly?
|
| Or try to find a retro computer, e.g. a BBC micro and start
| programming it for fun?
| Tmkly wrote:
| I was looking at a vintage computer, so yeah that's a possible
| route. Been using emulators so far but it's not the real thing.
| Thanks.
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'd say if you have experience with vintage computer then
| it's probably worthwhile to get one. However just work with
| an emulator if it's not too exciting to hold a real machine
| because the cost of maintenance might be pretty high.
| dhosek wrote:
| I'd second the emulator recommendation. While programming,
| say, an Apple ][+ can be fun, getting one running maybe not
| so much. Plus, with an emulator, you'll have the ability to
| do things like write your code in a modern editor and then
| paste it over to the emulator rather than trying to work
| with 8-bit tools. I used to hand-assemble my 6502 code back
| in the day because I couldn't afford to buy a fancy macro
| assembler, but I wouldn't recommend writing code in long
| hand and filling in the hex codes on paper before typing it
| all in to anyone in 2022.
| rg111 wrote:
| Read these books-
|
| - _Innovators_ by Walter Isaacson
|
| - _Code_ by Charles Petzold
|
| - _The Annotated Turing_ by Charles Petzold
|
| - _Where The Wizards Stay Up Late_ by Katie Hafner
|
| - _The Information_ by James Gleick
| poiuiopkj wrote:
| I would recommend: The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers,
| Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution - Walter
| Isaacson
| asteroidimpact wrote:
| I found this to be a pleasant primer before delving deeper into
| the subject. Though, as you can see, as with all things, there
| are different takes on it's merit based on where people are
| coming from.
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/191355.Darwin_Among_The_...
| asteroidimpact wrote:
| Then again, I found myself here after reading:
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/16634.The_Glass_Bead_Gam...
|
| and
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/189989.Finite_and_Infini...
| fourthark wrote:
| If you have the money and time to take classes, I'd recommend
| which ever of the standard CS foundation courses interest you:
|
| - Programming Languages (and then Compilers, my favorite)
|
| - Algorithms
|
| - Operating Systems
|
| At a decent school with some level of difficulty, you'll learn
| the big picture while doing fun projects for homework, along with
| history.
|
| Programming is a craft, not a science, but it overlaps with math
| in a lot of places.
| stevenbedrick wrote:
| In addition to the great books listed here, a few more that might
| be of interest:
|
| - Turing's Cathedral, by George Dyson
|
| - Black Software, by Charlton McIlwain
|
| - Programmed Inequality, by Mar Hicks
|
| The Dyson book is a rigorous and deep historical dive into the
| philosophical and practical origins of digital computing, and is
| really great.
|
| The other two are equally great and deep but cover computing
| history through different lenses. The Hicks book in particular
| may be of interest for you, as its emphasis is on the history of
| computing in the UK. They're less directly about how computers
| "work", as such, and more about how computers and society have
| interacted with one another in interesting and non-obvious ways,
| and how those interactions have impacted the ways in which
| technologies have developed.
| rg111 wrote:
| I read some of the pages of Turing's Cathedral, and it read
| like an elaborate ad for Princeton. It also felt like a
| Princeton history.
|
| Whilr it is interesting, and I might finish it later, it is not
| something I was looking for or have time now.
|
| I also learned some cool things, like, Einstein forbade the use
| of the word "god" in a wall engraving becauae people might
| think that he believed in god.
| firebirdm wrote:
| I'm coming from a similar background and asked myself that exact
| question :)
|
| These two books helped me much already:
|
| Programming from the Ground Up by Jonathan Bartlett - A very good
| introduction to assembly
|
| Learning Computer Architecture with Raspberry Pi by Eben Upton -
| Great read about the inner working of memory and the CPU, with
| reference to the past and how things developed
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| Code, by Charles Petzold: http://www.charlespetzold.com/code/
|
| Explains how we got from Boolean logic to microchips and
| software.
|
| Also, the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley has an
| excellent exhibit containing both early computing devices and the
| seminal papers that were the precursors and enablers of modern
| computers: https://www.computerhistory.org/revolution/;
| https://computerhistory.org/timelines/;
| tapoxi wrote:
| Computer Chronicles was a PBS series that ran for 20 years and
| captured a lot of computer history as it happened, it's a great
| watch on YouTube: https://youtube.com/user/ComputerChroniclesYT
| Tmkly wrote:
| thanks will take a look!
| listenfaster wrote:
| Good: split your time between activities and reading something as
| satisfying as the things you "devour". To that end, I would plus
| one Hackers (Levy) and Code (Petzold). Also, the Cathedral and
| the Bazaar by esr
|
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/
|
| and other things from esr at
|
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/
|
| including the aforementioned jargon file. Here's one I hadn't
| stumbled on before, 'Things Every Hacker Once Knew'
|
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/things-every-hacker-once-knew/
|
| For an activity ymmv depending on how much time you can spend; an
| alternative to building a computer from scratch, or an OS from
| scratch, is to buy a vintage cheapie running cp/m or dos,
| something where the OS isn't abstracting memory management for
| you. Growing up in the 80s, I think managing my own memory and
| _everything_ that implies was the greatest teacher.
| Tmkly wrote:
| these resources look great, thanks. also yeah great suggestion
| for buying a cheap vintange microcomputer!
| AdamH12113 wrote:
| Having gotten into computers in the early 1990s, I knew a lot
| of "Things Every Hacker Once Knew", but I did find something
| exciting that I didn't know in the discussion of ASCII control
| characters:
|
| >ETB (End of Transmission Block) = Ctrl-W >Nowadays this is
| usually "kill window" on a web browser, but it used to mean
| "delete previous word" in some contexts and sometimes still
| does.
|
| I tried Ctrl-W in a Linux console and it works! This will save
| me some trouble in the future.
| shadowofneptune wrote:
| Though the cathedral/bazaar terminology is influential, I am
| not sure reading the original text helps understand open source
| as it actually is now. It concludes that open source would
| drive out closed source software, when what we see is open
| libraries being much more popular than open applications. This
| is in part due to Raymond's own work at the Open Source
| Initiative. I'd probably be better for someone now to read a
| retrospective rather than a treatise.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > It concludes that open source would drive out closed source
| software
|
| Relative to the pre-FLOSS era, this is exactly what has
| happened. FLOSS is ubiquitous today in systems software. Many
| of the current Big Tech companies and business practices
| simply would not exist without FLOSS computing
| infrastructure.
| corysama wrote:
| https://oxide.computer/podcasts
| [deleted]
| not-bob- wrote:
| I had aspirations on writing a book on 'pre-"software
| engineering" history of software' that hasn't made much progress.
|
| I used NATO's conferences in 1968 and 1969 on "The Software
| Problem" as my inspiration.
|
| Now that the ACM digital library is available without
| subscription, that would be a good resource of their
| publications.
| asciimov wrote:
| I highly enjoy the nandgame[0]. Its a game that goes from the
| basics of building simple logic gates all the way up through
| building memory and an ALU. While you can go into it blind expect
| to need to study and look up a ton of stuff if you have never had
| an intro-electronics course. Best of all it's a free web game.
|
| Classes to look into. An intro course in microcontrollers would
| be a good place to start. Usually you will find them attached to
| the Electrical Engineering department. Maybe take a course in
| Circuits or Computer Architecture.
|
| [0] - www.nandgame.com
| enahs-sf wrote:
| Computer history museum in San Jose is pretty cool.
| Austin_Conlon wrote:
| Are you referring to the one in Mountain View, or is there
| another one?
| chillpenguin wrote:
| In terms of computing history, The Dream Machine by Mitchell
| Waldrop is incredibly good.
|
| In terms of "how computers work" I agree with others who
| recommended Elements of Computing Systems (aka nand2tetris).
| quirino wrote:
| The Dream Machine is easily one of the best-written books I've
| ever read. Really gives a good overview of how many people are
| involved in various ways in the evolution of computing.
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