Legacy Code - A History of computing
Free 360 page book about history of computing
What it does
Discover the brilliant, often chaotic origins of the digital world. A witty history of computing covering ENIAC, Grace Hopper, the Apollo 11 code, and the birth of Unix. Book One of the Legacy Code series. Inside this first volume: The Von Neumann Architecture Punched Cards Assembly. Grace Hopper Fortran & COBOL LISP IBM System/360 Margaret Hamilton The 1968 Crisis Unix & C SQL database The birth of ARPANET
Does the same job
all alternatives →- IWI wrote a technical history book on LispFeb 2026 · berksoft.ca · ▲252
The book page links to a blog post that explains how I got about it (and has a link to sample content), but the TL&DR is that I could not find a lot of books that were on "our" history _and_ were larded with technical details. So I set about writing one, and some five years later I'm happy to share the result. I think it's one of the few "computer history" books that has tons of code, but correct me if I'm wrong (I wrote this both to tell a story and to learn :-)). My favorite languages are Smalltalk and Lisp, but as an Emacs user, I've been using the latter for much longer and for my…
- 8C8Bit Computers Book2021 · ▲83
Hi everybody! Due to Covid 19 pandemic I was forced in my home, so I revamped my book https://8bit.gioorgi.com It is a huge collection of information about the 8bit comnputer era (1980-1985) up to the NES console. I collected information from various source including “The 8bit Guy” videos and specific site (like C64 wiki, nesdev etc). I am using docusaurus to give a pleasnt look to the whole site. Please give me you feedback (and happy new year btw)!
- AZA zoomable, searchable archive of BYTE magazine2025 · byte.tsundoku.io · ▲423
A while ago I was looking for information on a obscure and short lived British computer. I found an article[1] in the archives of BYTE magazine[2] - and was captivated immediately by the tech adverts of bygone eras. This led to a long side project to be able to see all 100k pages of BYTE in a single searchable place. [1]: https://byte.tsundoku.io/#198502-381 [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17683184
More life & fun this month
the category →- TL
Life & fun · 10d ago · louisabraham.github.io
Photosynthesis fires two of your iPhone
Life & fun · 29d ago · photosynthesis.camera
- CCCreatium Coach▲320
Your multimedia mentor that takes you from mid to great
Life & fun · 11d ago · producthunt.creatium.info
SoloUno▲310Take control of hair pulling, nail biting & skin picking
Life & fun · 29d ago · solouno.io
Launched alongside, April 2026
the whole month →
- AG
Thought the resources for GPU arch were lacking, so here we are
Life & fun · Apr 2026 · jaso1024.com
- IB
Built a ~9M param LLM from scratch to understand how they actually work. Vanilla transformer, 60K synthetic conversations, ~130 lines of PyTorch. Trains in 5 min on a free Colab T4. The fish thinks the meaning of life is food. Fork it and swap the personality for your own character.
AI · Apr 2026 · github.com
- BC
Life & fun · Apr 2026 · sam-burns.com
- IB
With social media and now AI, its important to keep the indie web alive. There are many people who write frequently. Blogosphere tries to highlight them by fetching the recent posts from personal blogs across many categories. There are two versions: Minimal (HN-inspired, fast, static): https://text.blogosphere.app/ Non-minimal: https://blogosphere.app/ If you don't find your blog (or your favorite ones), please add them. I will review and approve it.
AI · Apr 2026 · text.blogosphere.app