A historical record of foundational web development blog posts.

This site features a curriculum developed around the television series, Halt and Catch Fire (2014-2017), a fictional narrative about people working in tech during the 1980s-1990s.

The intent is for this website to be used by self-forming small groups that want to create a “watching club” (like a book club) and discuss aspects of technology history that are featured in this series.

Designed and curated by Ashley Blewer whose own website is a work of art.

Between 1939 and 1941, the Works Progress Administration collaborated with the New York City Tax Department to collect photographs of most buildings in the five boroughs of New York City. In 2018, the NYC Municipal Archives completed the digitization and tagging of these photos. This website places them on a map.

The 1619 Project is a major initiative from The New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. It aims to reframe the country’s history, understanding 1619 as our true founding, and placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of the story we tell ourselves about who we are.

This new project from The New York times is a critical piece of journalism and history that couldn’t have arrived at a more important moment in time. Quoting from the announcement on Twitter:

It’s not just democracy, American capitalism, health care, and music that were shaped by America’s history with slavery. Everything from traffic to the wage gap were affected by the institution as well.

We’re surrounded every single day by the fallout from our forebears’ barbaric treatment of Africans and Native populations. The 1619 Project is a step toward fully acknowledging slavery’s role in our modern world.

The late 1960s saw progressive ideas emanate from the countercultural underground and revolutionise society. Challenging oppressive, outdated norms and expectations, a small number of individuals brought about far-reaching changes as they sought to attain a better world. Their idealism and actions helped mobilise a movement which continues to inspire modern activists and shape how we live today.

Stewart Brand was involved in a number of the key revolutionary events of the late 1960s: he co-founded the Trips Festival of 1966, one of the first large-scale hippy gatherings; founded and edited the Whole Earth Catalog, widely considered the pre-cursor to the internet for its user-generated content and knowledge-sharing; and he filmed the “Mother of All Demos” in 1968, where Douglas Englebart presented the first word processing, computer mouse, hyperlinks and video conferencing. Since then, Brand has co-founded the world’s first open virtual community, the WELL, in 1984 and the Long Now Foundation in 1996, which aims to encourage long-term thinking to prompt more responsible human action.

The current generation of technologists could learn quite a bit from Stewart Brand and the historic context surrounding the early days of the tech scene…

(via Stewart Brand talks about the LSD trip that inspired his Whole Earth Catalog on BoingBoing)

Programming time, dates, timezones, recurring events, leap seconds… everything is pretty terrible.

The common refrain in the industry is Just use UTC! Just use UTC! And that’s correct… sort of. But if you’re stuck building software that deals with time, there’s so much more to consider.

It’s time… to talk about time.

With this beautifully designed online companion to a series of presentations, Zach Holman goes deep on time as it pertains to computing history.

Related: The Wikipedia entry for the ISO 8601 standard and RFC 3339 which covers timestamps on the Internet.

Rejected Princesses is a fabulous website featuring the stories of women “too awesome, awful, or offbeat for kids’ movies” run by illustrator and former DreamWorks animator Jason Porath. I came across the site via his Twitter thread sharing Neerja Bhanot’s story resisting the armed hijackers on Pan Am Flight 73:

In 1986, a 22-year-old flight attendant named Neerja Bhanot fended off a group of armed hijackers on Pan Am flight 73. When the attackers boarded the plane, she shouted a secret command to the pilots, allowing them to escape. With them gone, she was now the senior member on the plane. It was her, the rest of the crew, and 300+ passengers.

She and the crew set about hiding all the international passengers’ passports, so they wouldn’t be targeted. After 17 hours, the power began to fail and the terrorists began opening fire and setting off explosives. She threw open the emergency exit. She died on that plane, shielding children with her body. She died 2 days short of her birthday, which is today [September 7th]. She would have been 54.

It’s also worth checking out the site’s blog which contains additional stories and bits of ephemera.

Decades after the fall of the Third Reich, it feels impossible to understand how Adolf Hitler, the tyrant who orchestrated one of the largest genocides in human history, could ever have risen to power in a democratic country. So how did it happen, and could it happen again? Alex Gendler and Anthony Hazard dive into the history and circumstances that allowed Hitler to become Führer of Germany.

Jason Kottke shared this excellent video which gives a high-level overview of Hitler’s rise through the ranks of German government in the run up to World War II. As chance would have it, I’ve recently been reading up on the very same subject (thanks, Wikipedia).

The video is part of a TED-Ed lesson that includes additional links and resources.

Docubyte photographed the original machines at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park, and the images were then retouched by Ink—and placed on a series of rather lovely coloured backgrounds—to restore them digitally to how they would have looked when new.

So. Cool.