CompHist is a very incomplete history of computer science. Researching the history of computer science and the fabulous people that made it happen is one of my hobbies since many years. I had the great pleasure to talk to a lot of the first computer scientists in Germany. On this page, I try to document the people, machines, languages, and failures that shaped computing, from Babbage’s Analytical Engine to the LLM era. Each entry traces technical facts and human stories. The Dead Ends section is the most instructive part.
CompHist is a very incomplete history of computer science. Researching the history of computer science and the fabulous people that made it happen is one of my hobbies since many years. I had the great pleasure to talk to a lot of the first computer scientists in Germany. On this page, I try to document the people, machines, languages, and failures that shaped computing, from Babbage’s Analytical Engine to the LLM era. Each entry traces technical facts and human stories. The Dead Ends section is the most instructive part.
CompHist is a very incomplete history of computer science. Researching the history of computer science and the fabulous people that made it happen is one of my hobbies since many years. I had the great pleasure to talk to a lot of the first computer scientists in Germany. On this page, I try to document the people, machines, languages, and failures that shaped computing, from Babbage’s Analytical Engine to the LLM era. Each entry traces technical facts and human stories. The Dead Ends section is the most instructive part.
> I discovered that I don’t actually read names, I just pattern match, and I have sometimes gotten hundreds of pages into a novel before I realize that I have no clear sense of the the middle syllables of the protagonist’s name.
Same. And even for Tailscale we use a European alternative (Xplicittrust), because this aggressive growth of VC backed American tech is a real turn-off. We have seen where that leads often enough by now.
Do I understand that correctly: in the US the approach is to mitigate the impact of eating poultry that was sick during it's lifetime, while the EU tries to prioritize preventing the animals becoming sick?
People come from mobile contact apps, where it's normal to call contacts "Mother of <kids classmate>", "Sara Mobile New 2025", or "Hot Wife".
Now "unified messaging" tries to blur the lines between technologies and I completely understand that people expect that only the necessary information (the email address) is leaving their devices.
So maybe it's time to change the default behavior of email clients?