Historical Source Code Every Developer Should See
This piece lists some historical source code that today’s engineers, in the opinion of the author, should read and know. The artifacts in question are the WWW demo source code, an early C compiler, pieces of the early Unix research code bases, the first Linux release, and Mocha, the first JavaScript engine.
While all of these (maybe, and forgive the snark, with the exception of Mocha) are relevant, I cannot help but wonder about the author’s rationale for choosing these particular specimen. The author argues these “built the foundation of today’s computer technology”. I beg to differ.
Graphical user interfaces are quite a thing in today’s computer technology, one should think. These owe a lot to BitBlt, the Xerox Alto machine, and, consequently, Smalltalk (that programming language had an IDE with a GUI back in the 1970s). So, for source code, I’d add to the list this memo from 1975 describing BitBlt, and the Computer History Museum’s page on the Xerox Alto source code.
Tags: hacking, the-nerdy-bit