Strictly speaking that's a conflation of two distinct strands of history that were a decade and a half apart.
AT&T #Unix System 5 Release 3 had the system of subdirectories and scriptlets, developed because /etc/rc had exploded into a mess when people came to realize that sysops installed third party softwares. This was superseded by something else, the SAF, in S5R4 in 1988. Unices with AT&T heritage such as #Illumos and #Tribblix have that still today, all these decades later.
Whereas what people erroneously call "System V init" was an init+rc system developed independently, for a different operating system with a separate lineage, cloning the design of the old AT&T Unix S5R3 system of roughly a decade before, by Miguel van Smoorenburg in the early to middle 1990s. *That* is the strand of history that went from Minix on to Linux, and was in some flavours succeeded by Upstart and then by systemd.
#HistoryOfComputing #retrocomputing #Upstart #ServiceAccessFacility
Frances Elizabeth Allen: The Woman Who Made Code Run Fast – and Was Forgotten
#HackerNews #FrancesAllen #Legacy #WomenInTech #CodeOptimization #ComputerScience #HistoryOfComputing
Frances Allen sits down to discuss how compiler optimisation became computing’s invisible foundation. From farm girl to Turing Award winner, she reveals why the most profound technical achiev…
The KIM-1, short for Keyboard Input Monitor, is a small 6502-based single-board computer developed and produced by MOS Technology, Inc. and launched in 1976. It was very successful in that period, due to its low price (thanks to the inexpensive 6502 microprocessor) and easy-access expandability. - Wikipedia
Discovered this very early historic home computer from my morning music "On the Other Ocean the debut studio album by American composer David Behrman,.. Considered a pioneering work of computer music, the album pairs electronics controlled by a KIM-1 computer with live players."
Predictably and wonderfully, we can build one ourselves.
http://www.6502.org/trainers/buildkim/buildkim.htm
#KIM1 #Microprocessor #SingleBoardComputer #HistoryofComputing #DavidBehrman #DIYComputers #6502 #MOSTechnology6502
Euler Conjecture and CDC 6600
https://fortran-lang.discourse.group/t/euler-conjecture-and-cdc-6600/10501
#HackerNews #EulerConjecture #CDC6600 #Mathematics #ComputerScience #HistoryOfComputing
In 1966, Lander and Parkin published a paper containing exactly two sentences. They reported that they had used a program that used direct search on a CDC 6600 to obtain one counterexample to Euler’s Sum Of Powers Conjecture. The result: 27^4 + 84^4 +110^4 +133^4 =144^4 A small program, written in Fortran and using OpenMP, reproduces this result (and others of a similar nature) in two minutes on a current PC (OpenMP, 8 threads). I am curious to know if anyone can estimate how long the CDC 66...
Call for Applications: ACM History and Archiving Fellowship program, due 28th February 2026
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) History Committee plans to support up to 5 research projects with awards of up to $4,000 each. Call is at link below.
#historyofcomputing #softwarehistory #aihistory #history
https://history.acm.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/ACM-HC-fellowship-CFP-2026-final.pdf
https://log.pyratebeard.net/entry/20251127-rnd.lit.rec:_the_friendly_orange_glow.html
random.literature.recommendation: the friendly orange glow - this is the incredible story of the PLATO system. a computer platform built for education that spawned many aspects of cyberculture before the internet existed.
#literature #computing #historyofcomputing #plato #cyberculture #rndlitrec
Wonderful article about Tommy Flowers, Post Office engineer, and his crucial role in the history of computing.
#computing #historyofcomputing #bletchleypark
The Oxbridge-educated boffin is feted as the codebreaking genius who helped Britain win the war. But should a little-known Post Office engineer named Tommy Flowers be seen as the real father of computing?
Microsoft đã công bố mã nguồn mở của trình thông dịch BASIC 6502 gốc, từng chạy trên Apple II, Commodore PET. Đây là một kho báu cho những ai quan tâm đến lịch sử máy tính và lập trình cấp thấp. #Microsoft #6502BASIC #opensource #lập_trình #mã_nguồn_mở #historyofcomputing
https://dev.to/shiva_shanker_k/microsoft-just-open-sourced-the-original-6502-basic-interpreter-559o
> It's really stunning that it does not mention the Scheme language
So very, very true.
There are several large pieces of history in this regard that deserve not only to be published, but to be studied well.
Just a properly written history of closures in computer programming would be worth its weight in gold.
Even a short history.
#Algol
#BlockStructure
#CallByName
#Closures
#HistoryOfComputing
#Lisp
#Scheme
New short piece on magnetic tape libraries — a lesser-known yet vital infrastructure of the mainframe computing era.
Used in everything from census bureaus to medical data and scientific labs, these physical repositories shaped how data was stored, accessed, and processed for decades.
JdeBP
Hacker News
Andi Chorley
Jeffrey Yost
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Steve Brodie
Vassil Nikolov | Васил Николов
Ones & Zeroes