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45 posts
Microsoft's August 2016 announcement put PowerShell on GitHub and introduced it on Linux and macOS, changing its scope well beyond Windows administration.
Jim Hall's June 29, 1994 Usenet post proposed PD-DOS with a manifest and task list; contributors responded, and the GPL project became Free-DOS within weeks.
FreeBSD 2.0's November 22, 1994 release rebuilt the system on 4.4BSD-Lite, cleared its inherited legal uncertainty, and reset installation and compatibility.
DragonFly BSD began from FreeBSD 4.8 in June 2003 and was announced July 16, pursuing Matthew Dillon's LWKT, message-passing, clustering, and SMP design.
FreeBSD 7.0 added ZFS in 2008, but FreeBSD 10.0 made root-on-ZFS a guided bsdinstall option with pool, RAID, sector, and GELI controls.
How BeOS's commercial rise and fall inspired a community to rebuild its technologies and user experience as the open-source Haiku project.
Haiku R1 Beta 1 shipped on September 28, 2018, moving the project beyond its alpha series with package management and broader hardware work.
Commands seem to vanish between sessions, or history from multiple terminals overwrites instead of combining — how history writing works and the fix for each.
Every shell in daily use today descends from a 1971 command interpreter, branching through PWB, Bourne, and C shell into the families still visible now.
Released as beta version .99 on June 8, 1989, Bash was built for the GNU Project as a free replacement for the Bourne shell and other proprietary Unix shells.
Distributed starting with 2BSD in 1979, Bill Joy's C shell introduced command history and aliases — features nearly every shell released since has copied.
Released February 13, 2005 by Swedish developer Axel Liljencrantz, Fish chose sensible-by-default behavior and built-in syntax highlighting over POSIX compatibility.
Posted to Usenet by a Princeton student in 1990, Zsh combined the strongest interactive features of several existing shells, decades before becoming macOS's default.
A forensic account of the dot-com boom, its long collapse, and why real innovation coexisted with prices that outran plausible profits.
Why Y2K remediation, documented failures, and government testing show the bug was real—and why a quiet January 1 was evidence of preparation, not a hoax.
A field guide to this blog's evidence-first computing history: what belongs here, how sources are weighed, and why popular myths get corrected.
How transistors, integrated circuits, memory, displays, batteries, and manufacturing—not one magic chip—made personal computing portable.
What Tim Berners-Lee's August 6, 1991 Usenet summary actually announced—and why it was neither the internet's birth nor the first site's launch date.
IBM launched the 5150 in August 1981 with an unusually modular design whose documentation and suppliers helped create the PC-compatible market.
How Napster's June 1999 launch paired a central search index with peer-to-peer transfers—and why its short life permanently changed digital music.
Netscape's spectacular August 1995 debut became a symbol of internet investing, but one trading day did not create the dot-com bubble by itself.
How oversupply, weak publishing controls, retailer losses, and shifting consumer demand drove the US console market into its 1983–1985 collapse.
WSL's path from a cancelled Android-compatibility project through syscall translation to a genuine, Microsoft-maintained Linux kernel in a lightweight VM.
Microsoft shelved its Android-app bridge for Windows 10 Mobile in February 2016, consolidating on a single iOS-focused bridge just weeks before WSL's own reveal.
Be Inc.'s July 1999 IPO placed the company behind BeOS on public markets during the dot-com era, before Haiku began its reimplementation.
BeOS 5 Personal Edition launched as a free downloadable system that could live inside Windows or Linux, widening access beyond boxed releases.
How the Ninth Circuit treated intermediate BIOS copying in Sony v. Connectix, what the ruling protected, and which questions it did not settle.
Re-running the last command with sudo and fuzzy-searching everything typed today both rely on the same persisted, indexed log the shell writes to disk.
The famous '640K ought to be enough' line has no verified source, and Gates denied it on the record. What the paper trail actually shows.
Gore never said 'I invented the internet.' The exact 1999 sentence, how it mutated within days, and what Cerf and Kahn say his record shows.
ENIAC is taught as the first electronic computer, but 1973's Honeywell v. Sperry Rand invalidated its patent — partly over a 1941 visit to Atanasoff.
The Apple I and II are often credited as the birth of personal computing. The Altair 8800 beat them to market by more than a year.
What the preserved 1947 Mark II logbook proves about its famous moth, what later retellings invented, and what Hopper actually achieved.
How the 1988 Morris Worm spread through Unix systems, disrupted the young internet, drove CERT's creation, and led to a landmark US computer-crime conviction.
Google's September 1998 incorporation turned a Stanford search prototype into a company, but the algorithm, domain, and first funding came earlier.
What happened on November 2, 1988, how the Morris Worm propagated, why it overloaded hosts, and how the incident changed internet security coordination.
Why the US video game crash was a market and distribution failure—not one bad cartridge—and how Nintendo rebuilt retailer and consumer trust.
How two-digit dates created genuine Y2K risk, what engineers repaired before 2000, and why the rollover's relative calm reflected successful prevention.
How Google's SRE practice in 2003 and the DevOps movement in 2009 emerged independently, solved related delivery problems, and later converged.
The history, goals, and real-world use cases behind FreeDOS, the open-source, actively-maintained continuation of the MS-DOS-compatible operating system line.
How FreeBSD grew from the 386BSD Patchkit, survived the Net/2 transition, and built the release, ports, and governance model used today.
Trace Linux from Torvalds' 1991 announcement and early licensing through distributions, maintainership, Git and today's release process.
How Apple's 1996 acquisition of NeXT, and Steve Jobs' return, turned NeXTSTEP into the Unix foundation underneath every Mac sold today.
How MAME, DOSBox, libretro, reverse engineering, hardware research, and archival practice turned emulation into a preservation discipline.
How Microsoft's 1975 founding led, eighteen years later, to hiring a DEC operating-system veteran to build Windows NT from scratch.