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Ed Thelen's Nike Missile Web Site
Personal blog · ed-thelen.orghistoryhardwareprogramming
Ed Thelen's Nike Missile Web Site is a personal blog at ed-thelen.org about history, hardware and programming. Since 2008, 68 different Hacker News readers have linked it 94 times, most often “The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)”. No feed was found, so read it on the site itself.
Nike Antiaircraft Missile computer & radar, MIM-3, MIM-14, Nike Hercules, Nike Ajax
Most-linked posts?
- The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)7 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2011-08-07
- Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979)7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2011-12-17
- /comp-hist/lgp-30.html3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2014-06-09
- Cray-1 hardware reference manual3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2010-05-11
- /comp-hist/CRAY-1-HardRefMan/CRAY-1-HRM.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2026-01-13
- /comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-10-06
- A Personal History of APL2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-03-31
- The IBM 650: An appreciation from the field (1986) [pdf]2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-07-26
- /comp-hist/dg-nova.html2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2008-10-10
What Hacker News says?
Probably my favourite is along similar lines: read “The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth)” for a great story of Knuth as “this tall college kid” (consider the fact that Knuth first encountered a computer at college), from “Stories about the B5000 And People Who Were There”: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7 (PDF scan: https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10272464... p…
Comment linking /comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html
on “The Yoda of Silicon Valley”Submitted Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979) as a story · 122 points
HN discussionYou can get a bit of an idea by reading Knuth's "The IBM 650: An Appreciation from the Field", written in 1986 and nostalgically looking back at the 1956–60 period when he entered college and first encountered a computer (the IBM 650). The paper is available here and is gripping reading: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf I consider this the first and last generation of truly self-taught prog…
Comment linking /comp-hist/KnuthIBM650Appreciation.pdf
on “Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print”Submitted The IBM 650: An appreciation from the field (1986) [pdf] as a story · 54 points
HN discussionRe "being paid", consider that he took early retirement in 1992 to work on this book that he sees as his life's work ( https://cs.stanford.edu/~knuth/retd.html ) (and until then was doing in his "side" time, separate from his job of teaching and research), giving up whatever salary a tenured Stanford CS professor's would be, and has been living off savings and royalties since then: he only gets "paid" when people ch…
Comment linking /comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html
on “Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print”Submitted The Summer Of 1960 (Time Spent with don knuth) as a story · 41 points
HN discussionFWIW, here's a side-ways mention of Knuth's bounty, from http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html > So I sat down with him and proofread the pages as they came out of the typewriter. It seemed that he was composing and typing as fast as I could read. By morning the manual was done. Years later when don's first book came but, he told me that if I would proofread it for him that he would pay me a dolla…
Comment linking /comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html
on “Knuth's Art of Computer Programming, V 4B, has gone into print”Submitted Cray-1 hardware reference manual as a story · 41 points
HN discussionFor what it’s worth, the test was probably IBM’s Programmer Aptitude Test, I can find references to it going back to 1950 or so. http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/IBM-ProgApti-120-6762-2.html
Comment linking /comp-hist/IBM-ProgApti-120-6762-2.html
on “A Woman’s Story”Submitted Computing Before Computers (1990) as a story · 40 points
HN discussionKnuth gives higher rewards for works he believes have fewer errors. For TeX and METAFONT, he started with 1 cent for every bug found, and doubled it each year until reaching the current value of 327.68 dollars (= 0x$80.00): for example Eberhard Mattes and Oleg Bulatov (joint 7th on the list) have all their amount from a single (and the latest so far) bug found in TeX and METAFONT each (if you're wondering what the b…
Comment linking /comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html
on “I Got a Knuth Check for 0x$3.00”Submitted Cray-1 Hardware Reference Manual as a story · 29 points
HN discussionLooks like no one complained about the long comment, so some further trivia I omitted mentioning: • The problem that one cannot copy text from a PDF created via dvips and using METAFONT-generated bitmap fonts has recently been fixed — the original author of dvips, Tomas Rokicki ([1], [2]) has “come out of retirement” (as far as this program is concerned anyway) to fix this and is giving a talk about it next week at…
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on “Knuth on Huang's Sensitivity Proof: “I've got the proof down to one page” [pdf]”Submitted SAGE manual: an introduction to the first air defense network as a story · 22 points
HN discussionAn excerpt from an article[1] I ran across a few weeks ago seems appropriate: "The printer was the first drum printer that I had ever seen. It would print 1500 lines per minute alphanumeric, and 1800 lines per minute when only numeric values were being printed. It cost $243,450. Its reliability was somewhat suspect. I walked through the room that it was kept in every day for a year, and the only time that I ever saw…
Comment linking /comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html
on “The State of the Art is Terrible”Submitted Early British Computers (1980) as a story · 19 points
HN discussionThe USGS LIDAR maps. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/what-lidar-data-and-where-can-i-do... ... direct links from https://prd-tnm.s3.amazonaws.com/LidarExplorer/index.html#/ then click an area and on the right click an icon to bring up a point cloud viewer... it's fiddly, but incredible. This site for its depth on a niche subject (nike missiles): http://ed-thelen.org/ and for military telecom: https://www.electrospaces.net…
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on “Ask HN: What's the coolest website you know?”Submitted A Personal History of APL (1982) as a story · 16 points
HN discussionBonus trivia: those "Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers"? Those would not have been the 0-9a-f we're familiar with today, but 0-9fgjkqw[1]! [1]: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html#R4.13
Comment linking /comp-hist/lgp-30-man.html
on “The Story of Mel (1983)”Submitted Instruction Manual for Charles Babbage's 2nd Difference Engine as a story · 5 points
HN discussionIncidentally, while this is a great post, the order of yak-shaving is actually pretty close to the opposite described in the post. He started with wanting a digital version of Monotype Modern 8A (what became Computer Modern). His first idea was to go to Xerox and use their scanning equipment to digitize the font, but they would only let him use it if they would have copyright on the resulting fonts, so he started lo…
Comment linking /comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html
on “Donald Knuth – The Patron Saint of Yak Shaves (2017)”Submitted A Personal History of APL as a story · 5 points
HN discussion> So what are some dumb things developers constantly do? People will give tons of various anecdotes on this, but they apply to them , not you . The stories they tell are just the scorched remains of a unique learning experience that can rarely be communicated verbally. Keep doing things that seem interesting and hard. Don't be afraid to do stupid things. Everyone has to do a stupid thing at least once to learn from…
Comment linking /comp-hist/samp-IBM-think-sign.jpg
on “How to seem good at everything: Stop doing stupid shit”Submitted In Search of the Original Fortran Compiler (2017) [pdf] as a story · 4 points
HN discussionRead this and learn what Knuth did as his summer job in 1960 (he was 21 or 22): http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7 here is the conclusion of the chapter: "In 1961, the National ACM meeting was held in Los Angeles. The keynote speaker was Tom Watson, the Chairman of the Board Of IBM. Bob Barton was the second or third speaker after Watson. don and Lloyd and I were in the audience of approximat…
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on “Google to announce "new programming language for structured web programming" ”Submitted Stories About the B5000 and People Who Were There (1979) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionLGP-30 had 113 tubes (for logic switching? or memory?) of mostly type 5687, which elsewhere had industrial uses and were used in hifi audio (I'm unsure how), but are not appropriate for guitar amplifiers. Apparently they take a lot of plate voltage and get pretty hot. I found this brief writeup[1] on them (with pictures) mildly interesting. They can be readily found on eBay in a wide variety of pricing of various br…
Comment linking /comp-hist/lgp-30.html
on “LGP-30 found in basement, the same model of drum computer programmed by “Mel””Submitted Locations of Former Nike Missile Sites as a story · 2 points
HN discussionOne claim that caught my eye: Tex being unbuggy because it's written in the Literate Programming style. I like LP but that's a big claim. Occam's razor suggests a more likely answer: it was written by Knuth! A great programmer, and also one who grew up programming non-interactively: http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7
Comment linking /comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html
on “Programs to Read”Submitted Hunting Big Game in the Theory of Numbers (1932) as a story · 2 points
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