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A retrospective deep-dive into Lotus Improv, the cult-classic pivot-table spreadsheet that was a NeXT exclusive, examining its innovative multi-dimensional data modeling, its historical context with Steve Jobs and NeXT, and why it failed in the marketplace despite influencing modern spreadsheets.
Kid Pix creator Craig Hickman recounts the origin story of the beloved children's drawing program, tracing his journey from fine art photography to programming on early microcomputers like the Atari 400.
This essay argues that in the age of AI-generated code, the real value lies in the source—the history and reasoning behind technology, which human insight from diverse fields provides.
MIT_CSAIL celebrates the 90th birthday of Margaret Hamilton, a pioneer in software engineering for the Apollo missions.
A tweet by Gergely Orosz highlights that solo developer Chris Sawyer built Rollercoaster Tycoon in Assembly in the late 90s, with a reply from ThePrimeagen joking about the evolution from Assembly to C to Unity to AI agents.
Eric Lawrence recounts the history of the Fiddler Web Debugger and shares that Progress Software, its current owner, has reached out, signaling a possible change for the free tool.
This article argues that large language models represent a new level in the history of software abstraction, making natural language the interface, enhancing human agency, but not ending programming—instead, continuing the trend of intention replacing implementation.
This article tells the story of Eugene Roshal, the Russian programmer behind WinRAR, including his programming background in the Soviet era, his self-developed compression algorithm in 1993, the launch of WinRAR in 1995, and the brilliant commercial strategy behind the 40-day trial design: no feature limitation, only pop-up reminders, allowing free personal use to build an ecosystem, forcing companies to purchase bulk licenses, while opening the decompression code but keeping the compression algorithm closed to maintain market barriers.
A retrospective on HyperCard, the influential Macintosh software that pioneered hypertext and inspired modern web technologies, games like Myst, and platforms like Wikipedia.
A tribute to Tony Krueger, the Microsoft developer who pioneered the red and green squiggly underlines for spell and grammar checking in Word, a feature now ubiquitous in word processors.
This article explains how Spanish traders' practice of counting without thumbs influenced GnuCash's database design choice to store monetary values as integer minor units, drawing parallels to how historical oddities shape modern technology.
The author attends his 30th college reunion and observes grave concern among peers about AI's impact on the future, then recounts the nostalgic story of building a two-player Tetris game called BattleTris with friends in the 1990s.
Bill Gurley announces a blog post exploring how executives use open source concepts strategically, tracing the history from GNU, Linux, and Eric Raymond's 'Cathedral and the Bazaar' to modern business applications.
A detailed summary of an interview with Anders Hejlsberg, the creator of Turbo Pascal, Delphi, C#, and TypeScript, covering his career, design philosophy, and insights on software craftsmanship and AI.
A technical deep dive into the historical inconsistency of the typographic point unit, explaining why TeX (72.27 pt/inch) and Inkscape (72 pt/inch) use different definitions, rooted in 19th-century standardization and Donald Knuth's pragmatic adjustment.
A collection of fun and obscure software facts, including Tetris implemented in Conway's Game of Life, Vim being Turing complete, and the history of the backslash character.
A technical deep-dive into the historical reasons for creating WinQuake, a Windows-native version of Quake, and how it achieved performance close to the DOS version on Windows 95 and NT.