According to Geoffrey Cain’s book “Steve Jobs in Exile”, the titular entrepreneur told employees at his NeXT startup that were working on their first workstation that their platform would last maybe into the mid-1990s. All computing platforms rely on their app ecosystems to move them forwards, and some half-blessed,...

On page 168 of the April 1988 issue of BYTE Magazine, available online courtesy of the extraordinary Internet Archive, we can read an article introducing “two new compilers” for the FORTRAN (still all in uppercase) programming language. On the other hand, page 736, section 10.5, titled “Computer Languages” of the...

In an era where your favorite JavaScript runtime is rewritten in Rust by an LLM bored at lunchtime, and we need gigabytes of RAM to render a chat application, it is remarkably humbling to look back at the primordial soup of programming. You might scoff, roll your eyes, and adjust your Neovim configuration to...

Plenty of books in my programming library are a bit battered and dog-eared. “Tim Hartnell’s GIANT Book of Computer Games” has almost no spine left, having been cracked open multiple times in my childhood while I typed one of its BASIC listings into my parents’ Dragon 32 microcomputer. My copy of Fred Brooks’s “The...

One of the perks of running a magazine like this one consists of discovering hidden pearls in the history of computing and how these connect to one another in uncanny ways. Take, for example, the case of this month’s Library choice: a book that is the forgotten kickstart point for a long series of outstanding and...

Welcome to the 94th issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Killer Apps. In this edition: Graham argues that the “Killer App” phenomenon is in danger of extinction. Adrian enumerates some examples of “App Killers”. In our Vidéothèque section, we watch the moment Dan Bricklin told his team about the release of the...

I have more experience with situations where apps have already done the killing, than I have with being onboard with a killer app. I never used VisiCalc, for example, joining the spreadsheet revolution long after the field was already overfull with competitors (I certainly used some similar spreadsheet on the Dragon...

The name “Killer App” says a lot about the level of violence in the world of business (well, in the world in general). Such a piece of software is dubbed a “killer” if it somehow triggers a massive uptick in the adoption of its underlying platform, at such levels that would be otherwise impossible to imagine without...

Archival footage from the early 1980s has this distinct, almost palpable texture to it. For members of Generation X, it brings memories of Donkey Kong, He-Man, and Star Wars. The colors are slightly washed out, the audio hums with the analog hiss of magnetic tape, and the people on screen seem entirely unaware that...

The mid-1980s was the era when the personal computing vendors ended their war on themselves. In the belligerent phase, every time a vendor released a new computer, it was incompatible with everything that came before it. In “Where Are The Killer Apps?”, I showed that Commodore VIC-20 software does not run on the...

Welcome to the 93rd issue of De Programmatica Ipsum, about Functional Programming. In this edition: Graham explains the benefits of solving problems with a functional mindset. Adrian explores why functional programming was shunned until it was not. In our Vidéothèque section, we watch Joe Armstrong explain how...

Programming styles are supposed to be paradigmatic, in that they structure your thinking about creating software by providing unifying theories and methods that you use to plan, design, construct, and operate your software. In that sense, the way that you think about the software is everything, and the tools that...