Joined May 2018
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8 Mar 2021
Another post published!
Hope you find the ARPANET interesting, because it seems I'm doing a bit of a series on it. This latest post is a deeper dive into the ARPANET protocols and how they might have influenced TCP/IP.
twobithistory.org/2021/03/08…
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8 Mar 2021
Another post published!
Hope you find the ARPANET interesting, because it seems I'm doing a bit of a series on it. This latest post is a deeper dive into the ARPANET protocols and how they might have influenced TCP/IP.
twobithistory.org/2021/03/08…
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22 Feb 2021
Something I'm curious about—how do people go about *reading* an unfamiliar codebase? Tool-wise, do you just use your regular editor or something else? I gave Sourcetrail a go (sourcetrail.com/) but couldn't get it to work out of the box
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23 Feb 2021
I usually just use vim and grep too (seems like that’s common!). But can’t help feeling like there’s room for a tool specifically meant for reading rather than editing code. Maybe that tool is a debugger, but I’m not about to try to get a 40-year-old codebase to run
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17 Feb 2021
Thinking about getting an ACM membership just to have access to the digital library. I get hit with that paywall when trying to do research pretty often. Is an ACM membership worthwhile? I don't know enough about academic publishing to be sure
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10 Feb 2021
The other neat source that I found for my ARPANET post was the scenario booklet used to demo the ARPANET at the 1972 ICCC. I mentioned four of the scenarios in the post but there are a bunch of other ones that I didn't find room to describe:
archive.computerhistory.org/…
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10 Feb 2021
There was a related program called "ape" (perhaps for AP explorer?) that allowed you to query a database of past AP news stories that came through the hotline. The demo used the keyword "Nixon" to return news stories about the then-president
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10 Feb 2021
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had already started publishing articles about the Watergate break-ins a few months before the ARPANET demo at the October 1972 ICCC, so there were probably quite a bit of Watergate news in that database!
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9 Feb 2021
So a fun source that I found for my ARPANET post is from "Box 42" of the collected papers of Clay T. Whitehead, who served as the Director of the Office of Telecommunications Policy in the Nixon White House. This guy:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_T…
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9 Feb 2021
But there's other stuff in the PDF too! One of the coolest things is a bunch of drafts for the speech that Whitehead gave, with hand-written corrections and everything. If you ever wanted to read about how people were thinking about regulating big tech in 1972, it's a great read
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9 Feb 2021
Also, fun fact, if you come across an important source while doing research, and you just save the cloudfront URL for the source, you will have an awful time later trying to remember where you actually found the source
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7 Feb 2021
Trying to get back on this horse!
My latest post is my take (surprising and clever, of course) on why the ARPANET was such an important breakthrough, with a fun focus on the conference where the ARPANET was shown off for the first time:
twobithistory.org/2021/02/07…
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TwoBitHistory retweeted
22 Jul 2020
Great read (if you’re interested in web technologies 😂) from @TwoBitHistory on how JSON came to prominence: twobithistory.org/2017/09/21…
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28 Jun 2020
It's been too long, I know, but I finally got around to writing a new post. This one is about how REST APIs should really be known as FIOH APIs instead (Fuck It, Overload HTTP):
twobithistory.org/2020/06/28…
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7 Apr 2020
I wasn't able to work this into my post, but this is a seriously cool guide to ballistics written in 1911 for artillery officers. Includes range tables, chapters with titles like "the trajectory in vacuo," and an appendix on the greek alphabet:
archive.org/details/gunnerye…
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6 Apr 2020
New post is up! I wrote about how to solve differential equations using an analog computer from the '30s mostly made out of gears. As a bonus there's even some stuff in here about how to aim very large artillery pieces.
twobithistory.org/2020/04/06…
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6 Apr 2020
This month's blog post also comes with a fun animated visualization of an important component in the analog computer I wrote about:
sinclairtarget.com/different…
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