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Comment by EvanAnderson | Hacker News Reader

More stuff like this needs to be recorded. It saddens me to think how much of this kind of stuff is already lost from earlier times in computing. A lot of interesting stuff like this is captured from the history of the Mac[1] and from Atari[2], but the "folklore" from so many other companies and products is being lost.

Who are others who are doing this kind of work?

[1] https://www.folklore.org/ [2] https://ataripodcast.libsyn.com/

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There is a bit of "folklore" here but most of this post is program functionality that should be documented. Really only the details about the window class name and being fully resizeable without flicker are "folkore" details that go beyond the scope of good documentation.

Just opened Task Manager to confirm, the standard "Help" top level menu is conspicuously absent. Write those docs, everybody!

The Old New Thing blog [1] has a fair amount of Microsoft folklore.

[1]: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/

And there was even more folklore in the comments but Microsoft killed them when migrating the blog content to a new platform.

I find the smugness of frequent "Airtight hatchway" posts somewhat annoying in the light of the numerous Windows security vulnerabilities though.

The point of those posts is how frequently people think they've got a security vulnerability report that isn't one which makes it harder to spot actual Windows security vulnerabilities signal in the giant noise of feedback sent to Windows and Windows adjacent teams. Many of those posts directly mention that someone on Windows took too much time (assuming "some time" is too much time), researching enough information to assure some paying support customer that the issue they found was not a security vulnerability.

I can't fault you for reading them as smug, and some of them objectively are, but the intended messaging is not making light of how many Windows security vulnerabilities happen, but of how much time is spent going in circles around non-vulnerabilities when teams could be better spent dealing with real ones.

This is a great one: https://www.filfre.net

He did an incredibly thorough nine-part series on the history of Windows from DOS through 3.1 and the antitrust cases. It was fascinating. There's tons of other stuff here too.

thanks for the link! i really liked the series, but forgot to bookmark it and couldn't find it after. the Windows series starts here: https://www.filfre.net/2018/06/doing-windows-part-1-ms-dos-a... honestly, it could probably be made into a Halt And Catch Fire-style miniseries, it's so good. actually i think i'll re-read it now :)

"New Tricks For An Old Z-Machine" was great too!

The entire blog is so good & almost unbelievably long and thorough - it feels like the kind of sites the web was made for. I have no idea how long it all is cumulatively but I wouldn't be surprised if it's longer than some famously long works of literature such as the combined length of all lord of the rings novels.

The Dream Machine by Mitchell Waldrop [1] is an exceptional book documenting the early times in computing. Being a scientific journalist (Science and Nature magazines), he provides an unbiased account—which is not an easy job, to distill from first-person recollections—from Alan Turing up to the Mac.

And you will read it like you don't know how it's gonna end. Because that's how things happened.

(Really appreciate Patrick Collison and Stripe Press for re-publishing it)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Dream-Machine-M-Mitchell-Waldrop/dp/1...

There's a lot of stuff available but the problem is knowing what to look for.

For example, the book "Commodore: A Company on the Edge" chronicles quite a bit of Commodore lore, and there are numerous resources for both Amiga and C64 online. Too many to mention, really, and lots of them are heavily specialized. CSDb[0] for the C64 demo and cracking scene, for example.

I also recommend The Early History of Smalltalk[1] by Alan Kay himself and Mark Ferrari's talk[2] on creating pixel art for LucasArts games.

[0] https://csdb.dk/

[1] http://worrydream.com/EarlyHistoryOfSmalltalk/

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMcJ1Jvtef0

The On the Metal[1] podcast had some absolutely magical interviews for this sort of thing in their first season. I honestly loved them all and there are great stories in each of them, but purely for the folklore aspects I’d highlight the Jeff Rothschild and Tom Lyon episodes.

[1] https://oxide.computer/podcast/

A story about WordPerfect from an insider executive https://www.wordplace.com/ap/

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