Perlisisms - "Epigrams in Programming" by Alan J. Perlis
It’s fascinating to see how many of these have no connection to programming today, but also how many do.
Ancient Stones - Homepage
Useful site that contains details of standing stones in and around the Lothians.
The War of the Worlds · Orson Welles on the Air, 1938-1946
The (in)famous radio adaptation of The War of the Worlds.
We Shall Fight Them in The Strips: Dudley Watkins and the Battle of Britain - The Gutter Review
Someone has suggested to me, without any sources cited, that DC Thomson was a supporter of the Nazi regime back in the 1930s (similar to the history of the Daily Mail, it seems).
I've gone looking for evidence of this claim and found nothing; I did find this though, which was kind of interesting.
Remove the "Authority" from Packaging - Packaging - Discussions on Python.org
Turns out the A in PyPA, meaning "authority", was originally intended as a joke. TIL.
History Of Font Lock In Emacs
Nice background on why font lock is actually called font lock in Emacs.
The mysterious history of the MIT License | Opensource.com
Short article about the unclear history of the MIT licence.
The lingua franca of LaTeX – Increment: Open Source
History of TeX (and in part LaTeX).
Emacs officially named in November 1976
Little tweet thread of emails that record the naming of Emacs.
Destroyer of worlds
Some background on how 8chan got started.
Rebuttal to Stallman’s Story About The Formation of Symbolics and LMI
A comprehensive rebuttal to the story that rms tells about Symbolics and the history of Lisp Machines.
The tweet that suggested hashtags, before they wete called hashtags
From what I've been able to see on the Net, this is the tweet that first suggested using a hash and a symbolic name to group together tweets by subject.
I can remember, back in the day, using this and an external website to then search particular tags on Twitter. Sadly I forget the name of the website.
Visual git History
Neat site that provides an animated view of the history of a file in git (well, mostly on GitHub and similar forges). Could be handy if ever needing to demonstrate how some code evolved.
Card punch emulator
Fun little punch card generator site -- makes an image of a punch card.
The TTY demystified
Some history and details about terminals, their history and their working. Likely very useful for people who haven't encountered actual terminal hardware.
Running Open Genera 2.0 on Linux
A guide (that, as per the into, is now kind of old) to getting Open Genera running on GNU/Linux.
In Loving Memory of Square Checkbox
A love letter to the square checkbox.
The (in)famous reddit "how did you take that photo?" thread
Fairly famous thread on reddit where someone took a photo of their tats, showing both hands, and someone asks how they took the photo, and then they ask how they took the photo of how they took the photo, etc...
The Rise, Fall, and Surprising Survival of dBase
A history of dBase.
ECMA-17: Graphical representation of control characters (1968)
The document that introduced the graphical representations of control characters.