Top all-time · #611
Two-Bit History
Personal blog · twobithistory.orghistoryprogrammingsystems
Two-Bit History is a personal blog at twobithistory.org about history, programming and systems. Since 2017, 100 different Hacker News readers have linked it 127 times, most often “Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020)”. The last post was in 2021, but the archive is still widely read.
Sometimes recommended · 14 of 38 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link it for long-form, deeply researched essays on the history of computing, such as RSS, Vim, Lisp and REST.
- Recommended for · 14 comments
- Called it "the best overview", "fascinating", "a nice writeup" and "worth reading".
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 38 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
A blog about the technical side of computing history.
Most-linked posts?
- Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020)10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2020-06-28
- What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?10 people · 10 mentions · first linked 2018-08-20
- OOP Before OOP with Simula8 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2019-02-01
- How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language7 people · 8 mentions · first linked 2018-10-15
- Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-09-19
- Things to Know About GNU Readline7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-08-22
- The genius of binary space partitioning in Doom (2019)7 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2019-11-06
- A Short History of Chaosnet (2018)6 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2018-09-30
- Where Vim Came From5 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2018-08-06
- Codecademy vs. the BBC Micro5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2019-04-01
What Hacker News says?
https://twobithistory.org If you think you'd enjoy long-form, deeply researched essays that look at the development of technical ideas throughout the history of computing, I've got you covered.
Comment linking /
on “Ask HN: What is your blog and why should I read it?”Submitted How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language as a story · 614 points
HN discussionAnd RSS 1.0 was a RDF-based reformulation of the XML-based RSS 0.91 from Scripting News/Dave Winer. That in turn was a fork of the XML-based RSS 0.91 from Netscape, which itself was a reformulation of the RDF-based RSS 0.9 from Netscape by Danny Libby and Ramanathan Guha. • https://web.archive.org/web/20060417192840/http://diveintoma... • https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/16/the-rise-and-demise-of-...
Comment linking /2018/09/16/the-rise-and-demise-of-rss.html
on “Aaron Swartz Rememberance Day This Monday”Submitted Where Vim Came From as a story · 420 points
HN discussionSemantic Web[1] reborn (after alleged[2] death)? Also I wonder how helpful Prolog infrastructure could be since they provided some useful frameworks [3][4] for that. [1] https://www.w3.org/standards/semanticweb/ [2] https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html [3] https://www.swi-prolog.org/web/ [4] https://www.swi-prolog.org/pldoc/doc_for?object=section(%27p...
Comment linking /2018/05/27/semantic-web.html
on “Abstract Wikipedia”Submitted What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do? as a story · 410 points
HN discussionThey where used for Chaosnet, which was, for example, implemented and usef on lisp machines from Symbolucs and others. cf. https://twobithistory.org/2018/09/30/chaosnet.html
Comment linking /2018/09/30/chaosnet.html
on “DNS Esoterica – Why you can't dig Switzerland”Submitted Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web? as a story · 376 points
HN discussionKnow your stack. Intimately. There's a very interesting book called "Hollywood Secrets of Project Management Success"†. Actually, IMO only about half of it is interesting, the parts about how Hollywood makes movies is fascinating, the rest of the book seems to me to be a mildly enterprisey pitch for Agile Methods, (of which YMMV.) THe fascinating thing about Hollywood is that it's old (over a century) and they have…
Comment linking /2019/08/22/readline.html
on “The Internet Relies on People Working for Free”Submitted What did Ada Lovelace's program actually do? (2018) as a story · 355 points
HN discussionPlease read https://twobithistory.org/2019/11/06/doom-bsp.html and https://30fps.net/pages/pvs-portals-and-quake/ Also, I think most of the x86 magic was done by Abrash.
Comment linking /2019/11/06/doom-bsp.html
on “John Carmack talk at Upper Bound 2025”Submitted The genius of binary space partitioning in Doom (2019) as a story · 354 points
HN discussionREST isn’t an architecture for designing HTTP API’s; it’s an architecture for designing HTTP itself. https://twobithistory.org/2020/06/28/rest.html
Comment linking /2020/06/28/rest.html
on “PostgREST: REST API for any Postgres database”Submitted Learning BASIC Like It's 1983 as a story · 284 points
HN discussionOver on lobste.rs, someone cited another article retracing the history of the Semantic Web: https://twobithistory.org/2018/05/27/semantic-web.html An interesting read in itself, and also points to Cory Doctorow giving seven reasons why the Semantic Web will never work: https://people.well.com/user/doctorow/metacrap.htm . They are all good reasons and are unfortunately still valid (although one of his observations to…
Comment linking /2018/05/27/semantic-web.html
on “The semantic web is now widely adopted”Submitted The Rise and Contentious Fork of RSS as a story · 253 points
HN discussionhttps://twobithistory.org/2018/12/18/rss.html grep'd for Dave Winer, check. Grep'd for OP - not found.
Comment linking /2018/12/18/rss.html
on “I'm one of the inventors of RSS and I need your help to reboot the Internet”Submitted How much of a genius-level move was binary space partitioning in Doom? (2019) as a story · 223 points
HN discussionUsing caps lock to escape is close to the ergonomics of an early terminal used by Bill Joy where the escape key sat to the left of Q. https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.htm...
Comment linking /2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html
on “Helix: Post-Modern Text Editor”Submitted Things to Know About GNU Readline as a story · 204 points
HN discussionLikewise, people dispute that Ada Lovelace was the first programmer, because Babbage and Menabrea had previously created a few simple example programs. But that downplays her accomplishments too much. She didn't write the "first program" but she was the first to understand what computers would be capable of doing (for example, that by assigning numbers to letters and symbols, computers could do more than simply perf…
Comment linking /2018/08/18/ada-lovelace-note-g.html
on “Turing Oversold?”Submitted Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020) as a story · 197 points
HN discussionCheck out two bit history! https://twobithistory.org/about.html
Comment linking /about.html
on “Ask HN: What are some great posts or articles about history of computing?”Submitted Friend of a Friend: The Facebook That Could Have Been as a story · 195 points
HN discussionSee also: "Where Vim Came From" https://twobithistory.org/2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.htm... Discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17696023 (420 points | Aug 6, 2018 | 259 comments)
Comment linking /2018/08/05/where-vim-came-from.html
on “Understanding the Origins and the Evolution of Vi and Vim”Submitted Things you didn't know about GNU readline (2019) as a story · 168 points
HN discussionThis is better than not breaking it down, but it's still not very good. McConnell advocates this approach strongly in his book on software estimation[1], and I've seen it work to some extent. It works for reasonably repeatable projects that are very similar to earlier projects you have experience with. But when we get into seriously non-trivial projects that are more "R" than "D"... well, it just isn't enough. The p…
Comment linking /2019/11/06/doom-bsp.html
on “It took 12 weeks to ship an MVP I thought would take 3”Submitted Version Control Before Git with CVS as a story · 152 points
HN discussionAwesome. Two-Bit History's latest essay is also a fascinating dive into Lisp. https://twobithistory.org/2018/10/14/lisp.html
Comment linking /2018/10/14/lisp.html
on “This Old Lisp”Submitted Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation as a story · 151 points
HN discussion
