Computing

What Hacker News says

1. RNeffSep 2012
   Computing: A Concise History by Paul E. Ceruzzi

   From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry by Martin Campbell-Kelly/

   The Computer History Museum is in Mountain View, CA, part of Silicon Valley, close to the Googleplex and Microsoft SV. It has the second, working Babbage Difference Engine. Also a youtube channel of lectures.

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2. paimapiSep 2026
   in the few books I've read about technological breakthroughs, the vast majority come from academia. I'm thinking about Eckert's adoption of IBM's ticker tape for commands rather than just rote data [0], all the inventions that came out of the NDRC [1] (for better or worse), the ENIAC, FORTRAN, how reliant solid state devices were on understanding quantum theory [2], and so many other examples. Paul E. Ceruzzi's "Computing: A Concise History" goes over much of this (including making note of the US military's heavy usage of LLMs for the Iraq War pre-empted the consumer push for LLMs)

   most of the things that private enterprise contributes is cost reduction and manufacturing capacity (important in their own right for ubiquity) but having extremely well-funded R&D and universities still seem like the primary driver for truly evolutionary and revolutionary breakthroughs rather than useful but not necessary optimizations

   IP law very much aims to protect the latter so that breakthroughs can be capitalized on but aren't a necessary motivator for researchers to continue frontier work

   (0)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_SSEC (1)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Defense_Research_Comm... (2)https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/textbook/semiconductors/chp...

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