Two-Bit History
Computing history in story form — from ARPANET to Doom to the BBC Micro.
twobithistory.orgI sometimes think of my computer as a very large house. I visit this house every day and know most of the rooms on the ground floor, but there are bedrooms I've never been in, closets I've never opened, nooks and crannies that I've never explored.
A beautifully written computing history blog that tells the stories behind the technologies we take for granted. Each post reads like a mini-essay — tracing the origins of things like GNU Readline, the ARPANET, or Doom's rendering engine with a narrative style that makes you forget you're reading about software. The blog hasn't posted since 2021, but every piece in the archive is worth your time.
Publishing since 2018.
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How the ARPANET Protocols Worked
The ARPANET changed computing forever by proving that computers of wildly different manufacture could be connected using standardized protocols. In my post on the historical significance of the ARPANET, I mentioned a few of those protocols, but didn’t describe them in any detail. So I wanted to take a closer look at them. I also wanted to see how much of the design of those early protocols survives in the protocols we use today. The ARPANET protocols were, like our modern internet protocols, or...
The Real Novelty of the ARPANET
If you run an image search for the word “ARPANET,” you will find lots of maps showing how the government research network expanded steadily across the country throughout the late ’60s and early ’70s. I’m guessing that most people reading or hearing about the ARPANET for the first time encounter one of these maps. Obviously, the maps are interesting—it’s hard to believe that there were once so few networked computers that their locations could all be conveyed with what is really pretty lo-fi car...
Roy Fielding’s Misappropriated REST Dissertation
RESTful APIs are everywhere. This is funny, because how many people really know what “RESTful” is supposed to mean? I think most of us can empathize with this Hacker News poster: I’ve read several articles about REST, even a bit of the original paper. But I still have quite a vague idea about what it is. I’m beginning to think that nobody knows, that it’s simply a very poorly defined concept. I had planned to write a blog post exploring how REST came to be such a dominant paradigm for com...
How to Use a Differential Analyzer (to Murder People)
A differential analyzer is a mechanical, analog computer that can solve differential equations. Differential analyzers aren’t used anymore because even a cheap laptop can solve the same equations much faster—and can do it in the background while you stream the new season of Westworld on HBO. Before the invention of digital computers though, differential analyzers allowed mathematicians to make calculations that would not have been practical otherwise. It is hard to see today how a computer mad...
Bulletin Board Systems: The VICE Exposé
By now, you have almost certainly heard of the dark web. On sites unlisted by any search engine, in forums that cannot be accessed without special passwords or protocols, criminals and terrorists meet to discuss conspiracy theories and trade child pornography. We here at VICE headquarters have reported before on the dark web’s “hurtcore” communities, its human trafficking markets, its rent-a-hitman websites. We have explored the challenges the dark web presents to regulators, the rise of dark w...
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