Legibility Used to Be Free
The Altair 8800 could not hide its own state; it leaked into a nearby radio. A browser front panel, 51 years on, beside a model that hides everything....
Key Knowledge
Grace Hopper's Nanosecond: The Wire That Explains Everything
Grace Hopper's famous nanosecond wire demonstration—and why understanding physical constraints still matters for every system we build today.
What CompuServe Taught Me About Platform Death
CompuServe had first-mover advantage, loyal users, and great technology. They still lost to AOL....
I Built a CMS at MSNBC Before Anyone Called Them CMSs
In 1996 at MSNBC, I built Workbench - a content management system for editors, copy editors, and photo teams before the term CMS existed....
Watching a Friend Get Hacked in 1987
A 1987 BBS breach taught me about trust models, intrusion detection, and why security-through-obscurity always fails eventually....
What Being a SysOp Taught Me About Running Systems
Running BBSs in the 1980s meant handling hardware, limited connections, users gaming the system, moderation, and community - with no cloud, no scaling, no....
The Dot-Com Crash From Inside
First-person account of running Core Logic Software during the 2000-2002 dot-com crash....
The USS Missouri's First Drone Surrender
During the Gulf War, Iraqi troops surrendered to the USS Missouri's Pioneer UAV - the first surrender to a drone in history....
Web Spy: The Personal Web Crawler I Never Released
I built Web Spy - a desktop app that crawled and cached websites for offline reading. This was before HTTrack, before Pocket, before Instapaper. Never shipped it....
Those Old Programming Books
Dog-eared, coffee-stained, held together by stubbornness and nostalgia. The programming books from the late 1970s that started a 45-year journey in technology....
My Web Crawler Crashed a Server at Los Alamos
How a homemade web crawler in 1993 crashed a Los Alamos server, the birth of robots.txt, and why AI companies are breaking the web etiquette that held for 30 years....
What Text Adventures Taught Me About Software
How text adventure games like Zork shaped my understanding of software design, interface thinking, and the power of constraints to fuel creativity....
When CompuServe Was the Internet (1985-1995)
CompuServe pioneered email, forums, and real-time chat for three million users a decade before the open web. The platform-as-internet pattern keeps returning....
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