Ryan Tomayko

unix-jun72 —

I love stuff like this:

The unix-jun72 project has scanned in a printout of 1st Edition UNIX from June 1972, and restored it to an incomplete but running system. Userland binaries and a C compiler have been recovered from other surviving DECtapes.

There’s also a mirror on GitHub.

alandipert's ncsa-mosaic —

The sources for NCSA Mosaic v2.7 — one the first graphical web browsers (1993) and certainly the one that led to the World Wide Web as we know it — can now be found on GitHub.

You can even run it on a modern Linux. Here’s what the GitHub homepage looks like:

The team that built NCSA Mosaic (Marc Andreessen et al) would go on to create Mosaic Communications Corp., which eventually became Netscape Communications Corp., which open sourced the Mozilla browser, leading to Firefox.

I wonder if any of the original NCSA Mosaic code still exists in any form at mozilla.org.

The Mosaic Wikipedia entry has a thorough history.

40 years of Unix —

Amazing, the way these things happen:

… in August 1969, Ken Thompson’s wife took their new baby to see relatives on the West Coast. She was due to be gone for a month and Thompson decided to use his time constructively – by writing the core of what became Unix. He allocated one week each to the four core components of operating system, shell, editor and assembler.

Constraints are powerful things.

How to Save A Life —

Aaron Swartz with a classic mindfuck. Reader beware: this same basic set of stories was told to me by a friend a few years ago and bothers me to this day.

Top significant moments from the Internet history —

Pretty. Y axis is a category of significance, X axis is the year. There’s at least one error: no mention of suck.com ;)

You are being lied to about pirates —

We live in a crazy world.

Why Does Hollywood Hate the Suburbs? —

“The reflexive reverence for Revolutionary Road is a testament to the degree to which antisuburban sentiment is one of the most unexamined attitudes in American culture.”

The arc of history is long . . .. —

Awesome photo of Obama addressing a massive crowd in front of the Old St. Louis Courthouse — the same place slaves were being auctioned as recently as 1861. Crazy.

Kent State Massacre —

This was the first year in a long time that I didn’t make it over to Kent to see the memorial and pay my respects. Growing up a few miles from where all this went down is still one of the most sobering experiences of my life.

The Rec.humor.funny Ban —

“John McCarthy, better known to many as the originator of the LISP computer language, called me up to say he would be leading the fight at Stanford to reverse the ban.” – Could the man possibly be any more credentialed amongst hackers?

It's Pi Day! —

“Coincidentally, Pi Day is also the birthday of Albert Einstein, who no doubt knew more than a little about pi.”

HyperText.m - source to TimBL's first implementation of hypertext (Sept. 25, 1990) —

From the comments: “HyperText is like Text, but includes links to and from other hypertexts.”

20 Year Archive on Google Groups —

I’m apparently the last person on the internet to see this. The rise of internet culture as recorded on Usenet. It’s beautiful, really.

The Federalist Papers —

An online edition of the Federalist Papers which is pleasant to look at and provides paragraph-level permalinking. Each paper is marked up in the hAtom microformat with an elastic layout (stays beautiful with bigger/smaller font size).

How Benjamin Franklin Made New England Prosperous —

Need more posts like this!

Ten Strange Facts About Newton [neatorama.com] —

I’m in the middle of Newton infatuation having just finished the first leg of Stephenson’s Quicksilver. Did you know they’re publishing the Baroque Cycle in three smaller trilogies now? The first is worth reading without any further committment.

Prohibition Politics —

“Americans in 1920 embarked on a noble experiment to force everyone to give up drinking. Alas, despite its nobility, this experiment was too naive to work… This popular belief is completely mistaken. Here’s what really happened…”

Jonathan Swift - A Modest Proposal —

An oldy but goody :)

Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine —

“One day when I was having lunch with Richard Feynman…” — need I excerpt more?

The Myth That “Eight Battleships Were Sunk” At Pearl Harbor —

It turns out Pearl Harbor was a pretty massive blunder for the Japanese. Fascinating.

360 in a circle, 60 minutes and 60 seconds… What is so special about 60? —

Blame the Babylonians – they used the Sexagesimal system. Don’t get excited – it means that instead of using base 10 (as we do) they used base 60.

Nikola Tesla (Wikipedia) —

Tesla’s wikipedia entry. I’ve been wanting to read up on him for some time now.

The History of the GNU General Public License —

“What led Stallman to the creation of this copyleft license was his experience with James Gosling, creator of NeWs and the Java programming language, and UniPress, over Emacs.”

Emacs as Cargo —

Came across this odd section in a “leaving Emacs for vi” document and it has a really interesting description of the history of FSF/GNU, Linux, and the evolution of Free Software. Seems out of place in this document but is worth reading.