I am reading three online resources in parallel – on the history and the basics of computing, computer science, software engineering, and the related culture and ‘philosophy’. An accidental combination I find most enjoyable.

Joel on Software: Joel Spolsky’s blog – a collection of classic essays. What every developer needs to know about Unicode. New terms like Astronaut Architects and Leaky Abstractions. How to start a self-funded software company, how to figure out the price of software, how to write functional specifications. Bringing back memories of my first encounters with Microsoft VBA. He has the best examples – Martian Headsets to explain web standards.

The blog started in 1999 – rather shortly after I had entered the IT industry. So it is an interesting time capsule, capturing technologies and trends I was sort of part of – including the relationship with one large well-known software company.

Somewhere deep in Joel’s blog I found references to another classic; it was in an advice on how to show passion as an applicant for a software developer job. Tell them how reading this moved you to tears:

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs. I think I have found the equivalent to Feynman’s Physics Lectures in computer science! I have hardly ever read a textbook or attended a class that was both so philosophically insightful and useful in a hands-on, practical way. Using Scheme (Lisp) as an example, important concepts are introduced step-by-step, via examples, viewed from different perspectives.

It was amazing how far you can get with purely Functional Programming. I did not even notice that they had not used a single assignment (Data Mutation) until far into the course.

The quality of the resources made available for free is incredible – which holds for all the content I am praising in this post: Full textbook, video lectures with transcripts, slides with detailed comments. It is also good to know and reassuring that despite the allegedly fast paced changes of technology, basic concepts have not changed that much since decades.

But if you are already indulging in nostalgic thoughts why not catch up on the full history of computing?

Creatures of Thought. A sublime book-like blog on the history of computing – starting from with the history of telephone networks and telegraphs, covering computing machines – electro-mechanical or electronic, related and maybe unappreciated hardware components like the relay, and including biographic vignettes of the heroes involved.

The author’s PhD thesis (available for download on the About page) covers the ‘information utility’ vision that was ultimately superseded by the personal computer. This is an interesting time capsule for me as well, as this story ends about where my personal journey started – touching personal PCs in the late 1980s, but having been taught the basics of programming via sending my batch jobs to an ancient mainframe.

From such diligently done history of engineering I can only learn not to rush to any conclusions. There are no simple causes and effects, or unambiguous stories about who invented what and who was first. It’s all subtle evolution and meandering narratives, randomness and serendipity. Quoting from the post that indicates the beginning of the journey, on the origins of the electric telegraph:

Our physics textbooks have packaged up the messy past into a tidy collection of concepts and equations, eliding centuries of development and conflict between competing schools of thought. Ohm never wrote the formula V = IR, nor did Maxwell create Maxwell’s equations.

Though I will not attempt to explore all the twists and turns of the intellectual history of electricity, I will do my best to present ideas as they existed at the time, not as we retrospectively fit them into our modern categories.

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