History

TL;DR A child born in 1700 inherited a world barely changed from their grandparents’; a child born today may see more transformation in 30 years than the 18th century saw in a century Moore’s Law drove ~50,000,000x transistor growth since 1971 - exponential growth is geometry, not hyperbole The transistor (1947) collapsed barriers to innovation: talent, equipment, communication, and capital AI is the latest accelerant on an already-exponential curve - the question is how we shape it, not whether it happens We are the first generation to face civilisation-scale choice at this speed A child born in 1700 inherited a world barely changed from their grandparents’. A child born in 1900 saw horses give way to automobiles, then aircraft, then space travel within a single lifetime. A child born today will witness more transformation in their first 30 years than humans experienced across the entire 18th century. ...

Before the era of always-online DRM and AI-powered anti-tamper software, the battle against software piracy was fought with cardboard, plastic, and clever manipulation of magnetic disk geometry. In the 1980s, developers faced a simple problem: floppy disks were incredibly easy to copy. Their solutions, however, were anything but simple. This was the “Copy Protection War,” an arms race between software houses and the burgeoning “cracker” scene that birthed the Demoscene and defined digital culture for a generation. ...

There is a specific sound that defines the childhood of a generation: the high-pitched screech and rhythmic thrum of a data cassette loading into an 8-bit computer. In the early 1980s, the United Kingdom underwent a transformation that was arguably more profound than the arrival of the internet a decade later. While the US was falling in love with the office-centric IBM PC and the “appliance” feel of the Apple Macintosh, the UK was building a nation of bedroom coders. ...

TL;DR The Amiga, launched in 1985 and dead by 1994, was a commercial failure - and almost every good idea in modern computing traces back to it Preemptive multitasking, graphics compositing, hardware-accelerated audio and video, plug-and-play expansion, and system-wide scripting all shipped on the Amiga while IBM PCs were still effectively 8-bit Jay Miner’s radical design used multiple custom processors, each with its own job - the same philosophy behind today’s GPUs and specialised silicon What killed it was not the technology but Commodore’s management collapse The lesson: deep architectural insight can put a machine a decade ahead, and still lose to distribution and business execution The Commodore Amiga was not the most successful computer. It was not the fastest. It was not the cheapest. It was introduced in 1985, bought by Commodore in a panic, and discontinued by 1994 as the company collapsed. By most commercial metrics, it was a failure. ...

TL;DR Compunet, started in 1982 from a flat in Islington on the Post Office’s Prestel videotex network, became one of the world’s first genuine online communities - 15 years before most people had an email address It had everything the internet later promised: real-time messaging, online games, pseudonymous identities, digital art, and a culture of people who knew they were part of something new Prestel was the world’s first public videotex system (1979), accessed by modem and paid by the minute through modified televisions and home computers By the 1990s it had vanished - Prestel shut down, servers went offline, and the community was almost erased from computing history Its story matters because it shows online culture was invented by hobbyists on the margins, not delivered by the internet’s arrival Long before Facebook, Twitter, or Reddit, there was Compunet. In 1982, in a small flat in Islington, London, two teenagers set up a computer bulletin board system on a network called Prestel. Within a few years, it had become one of the world’s first genuine online communities - thousands of people meeting in cyberspace, exchanging messages, playing games, and falling in love, all before the internet existed in public consciousness. ...

TL;DR A demo is a real-time audiovisual production built from nothing but code and mathematics - a 4-minute music video that weighs 64 kilobytes and runs on a Commodore 64 The scene evolved from the cracking scene in the early 1980s: groups added intros to cracked games, then realised the intros were the interesting part and dropped the games Size limits (4KB, 64KB) and weak hardware were the point - constraint was the art form Demoscene alumni went on to shape the games industry, graphics programming, and real-time rendering techniques still in use It remains the strongest example of a creative community that valued technical mastery as an aesthetic in itself The demoscene wasn’t about games. It wasn’t about productivity software or killer apps. It was about taking a computer that wasn’t designed for art, stripping away the operating system, and hand-crafting something beautiful in 512 bytes of RAM. ...

TL;DR 45 years separate typing BASIC on a ZX Spectrum and using Claude Code on a MacBook - the abstraction rose, but the core loop stayed the same Programming has always been: figure out what you want, type, run, fail, fix AI agents compress the feedback loop and raise the abstraction - they do not replace the act of directing the machine The tools changed from line numbers and 16KB RAM to natural language and cloud models; the discipline did not I suspect that loop will still be true in another 45 years I’m sitting at a desk with two machines. ...

TL;DR The 1983 Yamaha DX7 sold over 200,000 units by 1989 and remains arguably the most influential synthesizer in history - it did not just change synth design, it changed how modern music sounds It was built on FM synthesis, invented by John Chowning at Stanford in the 1970s and licensed by Yamaha - six operators producing timbres subtractive synths could not touch The glassy electric pianos, basses, and bells of mid-80s pop are DX7 presets; a huge share of the era’s hits used the factory sounds unchanged It was notoriously hard to program, which nobody cared about - and which accidentally created the preset culture that still defines synth use today Its influence runs to the present: FM engines sit inside most modern workstations and software synths The Yamaha DX7 wasn’t the first synthesizer. It wasn’t the most powerful. It wasn’t the cheapest. But in 1983, it became the most important instrument released that decade - and arguably the most influential synthesizer in history. By 1989, over 200,000 units had been sold. Today, it remains the second-best-selling synthesizer of all time (after the Casio VL-Tone, which was technically a calculator with a synth). ...

Computing Bletchley Park Bletchley Park - The historic site of World War II codebreaking and the birthplace of modern computing. Located in Milton Keynes, UK. The National Museum of Computing TNMOC - Located on the Bletchley Park estate, this museum houses the world’s largest collection of functional historic computers, including the rebuilt Colossus and the Harwell Dekatron (WITCH). Centre for Computing History Centre for Computing History - Based in Cambridge, this museum focuses on the personal computing revolution and features a massive collection of vintage consoles and computers. ...