The Internet: Born From Disaster Preparedness Myth
Popular lore says ARPANET—the proto-Internet—was built to survive nuclear war. Nice story, except it's bunk. Actually funded by DARPA in the late '60s, its real purpose was to let researchers remotely access expensive computing resources. Nuclear-proof routing was just a convenient afterthought and good PR.
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Fish: For the Terminal Hipsters
Fish ("Friendly Interactive Shell") appeared in 2005 aiming squarely at new users. It boasts smart autosuggestions, colorful syntax highlighting, and dead-simple scripting. Linux newcomers and developers love it. Old-school sysadmins view Fish as a suspicious fad shell, built by kids who weren't bullied enough in high school.
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“Less” command: born from Unix developers hating “more”
The less pager was explicitly created out of annoyance with more, the original Unix text pager. As files grew massive, impatient devs tired of more's inability to navigate backward through files. So they cheekily built a superior replacement and christened it less—because, obviously, "less is more." Unix humor at its...
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Microsoft’s Secret Past
Everyone thinks Microsoft hates Unix, right? Wrong. Long before Windows conquered the world, Redmond briefly pushed its own licensed Unix OS—Xenix—in the 1980s. It ran on PCs and minicomputers, sold reasonably well, and at one point even dominated Unix market share. Yes, Microsoft once proudly advertised itself as a "leading...
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ReiserFS: Filesystem Meets True Crime
ReiserFS (2001) pioneered journaling in Linux—fast, efficient, elegant. Sadly, creator Hans Reiser was convicted of murder in 2008. Linux distros understandably stopped shipping ReiserFS by default, though the filesystem still survives quietly on legacy servers, with admins awkwardly avoiding conversations about its creator.
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Punch Cards: 80 Columns of Historical Pain
IBM's 80-column punch card (1928) dictated line length standards decades after cards vanished. Terminal windows, printouts, coding style guidelines, even modern IDE defaults—all influenced by that arbitrary 80-column legacy. Why 80 columns? Because ancient punch card machinery was built that way. Modern coding standards owe more to cardboard rectangles than...
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