TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

Entries from the annals of computing history, once every two weeks. (Actually, every four for the foreseeable future 😞). twobithistory.org Joined May 2018

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

@devcount Appreciate your reaching out but I don’t know enough about AI to make any predictions!

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

It's got a fun diagram!* *for some definitions of fun

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Another post published! Hope you find the ARPANET interesting, because it seems I'm doing a bit of a series on it. This latest post is a deeper dive into the ARPANET protocols and how they might have influenced TCP/IP. twobithistory.org/2021/03/08/arp…

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

I usually just use vim and grep too (seems like that’s common!). But can’t help feeling like there’s room for a tool specifically meant for reading rather than editing code. Maybe that tool is a debugger, but I’m not about to try to get a 40-year-old codebase to run

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

Something I'm curious about—how do people go about *reading* an unfamiliar codebase? Tool-wise, do you just use your regular editor or something else? I gave Sourcetrail a go (sourcetrail.com) but couldn't get it to work out of the box

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

@danjacka This was excellent! Thanks for letting me know about it

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Michael Wood @_wodin_

5 years ago

@TwoBitHistory in case you haven't seen it before

Vala Afshar @ValaAfshar

5 years ago

The extraordinary power of a computer in 1962

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

@_wodin_ Then the men go off to play with their model railway!!!

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

@_wodin_ I love this. Thank you so much. Honestly the gender dynamics are my favorite part. The way they totally ignore the female programmer in favor of the hardware! Because men weren’t programming yet so it wasn’t worth examining

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

Thinking about getting an ACM membership just to have access to the digital library. I get hit with that paywall when trying to do research pretty often. Is an ACM membership worthwhile? I don't know enough about academic publishing to be sure

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

@pgayed @sinclairtarget Thanks, Peter! That’s very kind of you to say. I’ve got my hands full at the moment just trying to keep to my blogging schedule but if I’m able to do that a while I’ll definitely start thinking about branching out

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

Trying to get back on this horse! My latest post is my take (surprising and clever, of course) on why the ARPANET was such an important breakthrough, with a fun focus on the conference where the ARPANET was shown off for the first time: twobithistory.org/2021/02/07/arp…

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

@larsbrinkhoff Okay, thanks a lot. This is extremely useful info! I've only been able to find University of Illinois one, but good to know there are others

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

The other neat source that I found for my ARPANET post was the scenario booklet used to demo the ARPANET at the 1972 ICCC. I mentioned four of the scenarios in the post but there are a bunch of other ones that I didn't find room to describe: archive.computerhistory.org/resources/acce…

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had already started publishing articles about the Watergate break-ins a few months before the ARPANET demo at the October 1972 ICCC, so there were probably quite a bit of Watergate news in that database!

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

There was a related program called "ape" (perhaps for AP explorer?) that allowed you to query a database of past AP news stories that came through the hotline. The demo used the keyword "Nixon" to return news stories about the then-president

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

Also, fun fact, if you come across an important source while doing research, and you just save the cloudfront URL for the source, you will have an awful time later trying to remember where you actually found the source

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

But there's other stuff in the PDF too! One of the coolest things is a bunch of drafts for the speech that Whitehead gave, with hand-written corrections and everything. If you ever wanted to read about how people were thinking about regulating big tech in 1972, it's a great read

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TwoBitHistory @TwoBitHistory

5 years ago

So a fun source that I found for my ARPANET post is from "Box 42" of the collected papers of Clay T. Whitehead, who served as the Director of the Office of Telecommunications Policy in the Nixon White House. This guy: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_T._W…