History Archives - Igor Oseledko https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-category/history/ I know everything. Just not all at once... Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:09:57 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Routing Protocols: The Internet Finds Its Own Way, Usually https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/routing-protocols-the-internet-finds-its-own-way-usually/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:05:07 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135559 The internet doesn’t have a map. Individual routers exchange information about reachability using protocols — RIP, OSPF, BGP — and build their own local picture of the network topology, forwarding packets based on whatever their current table says. BGP, the Border Gateway Protocol, handles routing between autonomous systems — the large networks operated by ISPs, […]

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]]> The Turbo Pascal Miracle: A Full IDE in 64 Kilobytes https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/the-turbo-pascal-miracle-a-full-ide-in-64-kilobytes/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:04:14 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135557 Borland released Turbo Pascal in 1983 for $49.95 — a price that undercut the competition by a factor of ten and included an editor, a compiler, and a linker in a single executable that fit in 64 kilobytes and compiled code fast enough to feel instant on the hardware of the day. It was written […]

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]]> COBOL: The Language Written in a Weekend That Outlived Everyone Who Wrote It https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/cobol-the-language-written-in-a-weekend-that-outlived-everyone-who-wrote-it/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:02:56 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135555 COBOL was designed in 1959 by a committee led by Grace Hopper, with the explicit goal of making business programming readable by non-programmers. The language used English-like syntax — MOVE TOTAL-PRICE TO INVOICE-AMOUNT — on the theory that management might actually read the source. Management did not read the source. Programmers, however, wrote enormous quantities […]

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]]> Signal Handling: The Unix Asynchronous Interrupt System Nobody Gets Right First Time https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/signal-handling-the-unix-asynchronous-interrupt-system-nobody-gets-right-first-time/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:01:53 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135554 Unix signals are a mechanism for notifying processes of events asynchronously — SIGTERM to request termination, SIGKILL to demand it, SIGHUP historically for hangups, SIGSEGV for segfaults, SIGUSR1 and SIGUSR2 for whatever you fancy. They arrive between any two instructions, which means a signal handler can interrupt a running function at any point, including in […]

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]]> The PDP-11: The Computer That Unix Grew Up On https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/the-pdp-11-the-computer-that-unix-grew-up-on/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 07:00:36 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135552 Unix spent its formative years on the DEC PDP-11, a 16-bit minicomputer that arrived in 1970 and became the dominant research and university machine of the decade. The PDP-11’s architecture — its memory model, its instruction set, its 64KB address space limit — shaped Unix and C in ways that persisted long after the hardware […]

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]]> Multics: The Overengineered Ancestor Unix Was Specifically Built to Escape https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/multics-the-overengineered-ancestor-unix-was-specifically-built-to-escape/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:59:33 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135550 Multics — Multiplexed Information and Computing Service — was a joint project of MIT, Bell Labs, and GE begun in 1964 to build a comprehensive, reliable, shared computing utility. It would support hundreds of simultaneous users, have a hierarchical filesystem, support virtual memory, be secure, fault-tolerant, and extensible. It mostly worked. It also required a […]

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]]> The Bell System Technical Journal, 1978: The Issue That Launched a Thousand Careers https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/the-bell-system-technical-journal-1978-the-issue-that-launched-a-thousand-careers/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:58:33 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135548 In July–August 1978, Bell Labs dedicated an entire double issue of the Bell System Technical Journal to Unix. It contained papers on the operating system, the C language, the shell, tools, and the philosophy underlying all of them. The journal was not widely circulated outside Bell Labs and academia, but the papers that appeared in […]

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]]> TCP/IP: Cerf and Kahn’s Napkin Sketch That Became the Internet’s Skeleton https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/tcp-ip-cerf-and-kahns-napkin-sketch-that-became-the-internets-skeleton/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:57:11 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135546 In 1973, Vint Cerf and Bob Kahn sketched out the Transmission Control Protocol in a hotel lobby, attempting to solve the problem of connecting incompatible networks without requiring any of them to change. The insight was to make the endpoints — not the network — responsible for reliability: the network would do its best to […]

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]]> Git: Linus Torvalds Built a Version Control System in Ten Days Out of Spite https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/git-linus-torvalds-built-a-version-control-system-in-ten-days-out-of-spite/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:56:01 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135544 In April 2005, BitKeeper — the proprietary version control system the Linux kernel had been using — revoked its free licence for open-source projects following a dispute. Linus Torvalds, unimpressed with the available alternatives, spent ten days writing his own. The design goals were: fast, distributed, and proof against data corruption. Git tracks content rather […]

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]]> The Therac-25: When a Race Condition Became a Murder Weapon https://www.igoroseledko.com/blog-post/the-therac-25-when-a-race-condition-became-a-murder-weapon/ Thu, 26 Mar 2026 06:54:46 +0000 https://www.igoroseledko.com/?post_type=blog_post&p=135542 Between 1985 and 1987, a radiation therapy machine called the Therac-25 administered lethal radiation doses to at least six patients, killing several. The cause was a collection of software bugs in its control system — including a race condition in the user interface that, under specific timing conditions, allowed the machine to fire its electron […]

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