History of computing
Some interesting readings in Computer Science
Friday, January 21st, 2011I’ve just posted on the main Arcane Domain Web site a short bibliography of Computer Science papers that I have found to be particularly worthwhile. There’s no attempt here to be comprehensive or balanced. Rather, it’s a list of papers that I think are interesting, well written, of unusual historical significance, or just under-appreciated. A [...]
The Web is 20 Years Old Today
Saturday, December 25th, 2010Twenty years ago today, on December 25th, 1990, Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau first successfully connected a browser to a Web server — the Web as an operational system is 20 years old today.
James Gosling Interview
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010There’s a transcript of a terrific interview with James Gosling available at http://www.basementcoders.com/transcripts/James_Gosling_Transcript.html. Lots of irreverent, insightful comments on Java, Oracle, open source, Google and the Android suit, etc.
Sanjiva on 10 Years of SOAP
Thursday, June 24th, 2010I just noticed that in April, Sanjiva Weerawarana posted his own thoughts on 10 years of SOAP, with a somewhat more positive perspective than mine. I also see that his posting predates mine, so it seems we each noted the anniversary independently. For those who don’t know, Sanjiva has been one of the most important [...]
Ten Years of SOAP
Monday, May 17th, 2010Ten years ago today, at the 9th International Web Conference in Amsterdam, we held a panel discussion to introduce the SOAP networking protocol to the Web community. Just a week before, the SOAP 1.1 specification had been posted as a W3C Note. Many legitimate criticisms have been aimed at SOAP in the years since, but [...]
Lotus Notes 1.0 was released 20 years ago today
Monday, December 7th, 2009Ed Brill has a post noting the 20th anniverary of the announcement of Lotus Notes 1.0. Today is also the 25th anniversay of the founding of Iris Associates, the company set up by Ray Ozzie, Tim Halvorsen and Len Kawell to to create notes.
Happy Birthday, UNIX™
Wednesday, August 26th, 200940 years ago, in August of 1969, Ken Thompson‘s wife headed west for a few weeks on a family trip, leaving Ken the month it would take to allocate “one week each to the four core components of operating system, shell, editor and assembler” that he and Dennis Ritchie decided to write after work on [...]
40 Years of Internet RFCs
Tuesday, April 7th, 2009Steve Crocker has a nice piece in yesterday’s New York Times reflecting on 40 years of Internet RFCs.
A great talk on World War II Codebreaking
Sunday, March 22nd, 2009Bletchley Park was the estate where Alan Turing and an amazing team of codebreakers cracked several key World War II German ciphers, and where they built the world’s first programmable electronic digital computers. Bletchley is falling into disrepair, and there are ongoing efforts to raise funds to save it. While rummaging around following links about [...]