16 posts tagged “computer-history”
2026
Turbo Pascal 3.02A, deconstructed. In Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than James Hague lists things (from 2011) that are larger in size than Borland's 1985 Turbo Pascal 3.02 executable - a 39,731 byte file that somehow included a full text editor IDE and Pascal compiler.
This inspired me to track down a copy of that executable (available as freeware since 2000) and see if Claude could interpret the binary and decompile it for me.
It did a great job, so I had it create this interactive artifact illustrating the result. Here's the sequence of prompts I used (in regular claude.ai chat, not Claude Code):
Read this https://prog21.dadgum.com/116.html
Now find a copy of that binary online
Explore this (I attached the zip file)
Build an artifact - no react - that embeds the full turbo.com binary and displays it in a way that helps understand it - broke into labeled segments for different parts of the application, decompiled to visible source code (I guess assembly?) and with that assembly then reconstructed into readable code with extensive annotations
Update: Annoyingly the Claude share link doesn't show the actual code that Claude executed, but here's the zip file it gave me when I asked to download all of the intermediate files.
I ran Codex CLI with GPT-5.4 xhigh against that zip file to see if it would spot any obvious hallucinations, and it did not. This project is low-enough stakes that this gave me enough confidence to publish the result!
Turns out it's hallucinated slop
Update 2, 24th March 2026: rep_lodsb on Hacker News is someone who actually understands assembler, and they reviewed the annotations and found them to be hallucinated slop:
[...] Obviously, there has to be a lot more to even a simple-minded x86 code generator than just a generic "emit opcode byte" and "emit call" routine. In general, what A"I" produced here is not a full disassembly but a collection of short snippets, potentially not even including the really interesting ones. But is it even correct?
EmitByte here is unnecessarily pushing/popping AX, which isn't modified by the few instructions in between at all. No competent assembly language programmer would do this. So maybe against all expectations, Turbo Pascal is just really badly coded? No, it's of course a hallucination: those instructions don't appear in the binary at all! [...]
But searching for e.g. the hex opcode B0 E8 ('mov al,0xe8') is enough to confirm that this code snippet isn't to be found anywhere.
There is a lot more suspicious code, including some that couldn't possibly work (like the "ret 1" in the system call dispatcher, which would misalign the stack).
Conclusion: it's slop
Because it's amusing to loop this kind of criticism through a model, I pasted their feedback into Claude along with instructions to re-review their the code and it agreed with their assessment:
The commenter's core charge — that the annotated disassembly is "slop" — is substantiated. The artifact presents a mix of genuine analysis (real hex dumps, some correctly disassembled sections) and wholesale fabrication (invented assembly with plausible-sounding labels and comments for roughly half the binary). The fabricated sections look convincing to a casual reader but don't survive byte-level comparison with the actual binary.
What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.
— Joseph Weizenbaum, creator of ELIZA, in 1976 (via)
2025
Since getting a modem at the start of the month, and hooking up to the Internet, I’ve spent about an hour every evening actually online (which I guess is costing me about £1 a night), and much of the days and early evenings fiddling about with things. It’s so complicated. All the hype never mentioned that. I guess journalists just have it all set up for them so they don’t have to worry too much about that side of things. It’s been a nightmare, but an enjoyable one, and in the end, satisfying.
— Phil Gyford, Diary entry, Friday February 17th 1995 1.50 am
I believed that giving users such a simple way to navigate the internet would unlock creativity and collaboration on a global scale. If you could put anything on it, then after a while, it would have everything on it.
But for the web to have everything on it, everyone had to be able to use it, and want to do so. This was already asking a lot. I couldn’t also ask that they pay for each search or upload they made. In order to succeed, therefore, it would have to be free. That’s why, in 1993, I convinced my Cern managers to donate the intellectual property of the world wide web, putting it into the public domain. We gave the web away to everyone.
— Tim Berners-Lee, Why I gave the world wide web away for free
Well, the types of computers we have today are tools. They’re responders: you ask a computer to do something and it will do it. The next stage is going to be computers as “agents.” In other words, it will be as if there’s a little person inside that box who starts to anticipate what you want. Rather than help you, it will start to guide you through large amounts of information. It will almost be like you have a little friend inside that box. I think the computer as an agent will start to mature in the late '80s, early '90s.
— Steve Jobs, 1984 interview with Access Magazine (via)
Python: The Documentary. New documentary about the origins of the Python programming language - 84 minutes long, built around extensive interviews with Guido van Rossum and others who were there at the start and during the subsequent journey.
The Graphing Calculator Story (via) Utterly delightful story from Ron Avitzur in 2004 about the origins of the Graphing Calculator app that shipped with many versions of macOS. Ron's contract with Apple had ended but his badge kept working so he kept on letting himself in to work on the project. He even grew a small team:
I asked my friend Greg Robbins to help me. His contract in another division at Apple had just ended, so he told his manager that he would start reporting to me. She didn't ask who I was and let him keep his office and badge. In turn, I told people that I was reporting to him. Since that left no managers in the loop, we had no meetings and could be extremely productive
A computer can never be held accountable. This legendary page from an internal IBM training in 1979 could not be more appropriate for our new age of AI.
A computer can never be held accountable
Therefore a computer must never make a management decision
Back in June 2024 I asked on Twitter if anyone had more information on the original source.
Jonty Wareing replied:
It was found by someone going through their father's work documents, and subsequently destroyed in a flood.
I spent some time corresponding with the IBM archives but they can't locate it. Apparently it was common for branch offices to produce things that were not archived.
Here's the reply Jonty got back from IBM:
I believe the image was first shared online in this tweet by @bumblebike in February 2017. Here's where they confirm it was from 1979 internal training.
Here's another tweet from @bumblebike from December 2021 about the flood:
Unfortunately destroyed by flood in 2019 with most of my things. Inquired at the retirees club zoom last week, but there’s almost no one the right age left. Not sure where else to ask.
2024
Apple’s Knowledge Navigator concept video (1987) (via) I learned about this video today while engaged in my irresistible bad habit of arguing about whether or not "agents" means anything useful.
It turns out CEO John Sculley's Apple in 1987 promoted a concept called Knowledge Navigator (incorporating input from Alan Kay) which imagined a future where computers hosted intelligent "agents" that could speak directly to their operators and perform tasks such as research and calendar management.
This video was produced for John Sculley's keynote at the 1987 Educom higher education conference imagining a tablet-style computer with an agent called "Phil".
It's fascinating how close we are getting to this nearly 40 year old concept with the most recent demos from AI labs like OpenAI. Their Introducing GPT-4o video feels very similar in all sorts of ways.
Strachey love letter algorithm (via) This is a beautiful piece of computer history. In 1952, Christopher Strachey—a contemporary of Alan Turing—wrote a love letter generation program for a Manchester Mark 1 computer. It produced output like this:
"Darling Sweetheart,
You are my avid fellow feeling. My affection curiously clings to your passionate wish. My liking yearns for your heart. You are my wistful sympathy: my tender liking.
Yours beautifully
M. U. C."
The algorithm simply combined a small set of predefined sentence structures, filled in with random adjectives.
Wikipedia notes that "Strachey wrote about his interest in how “a rather simple trick” can produce an illusion that the computer is thinking, and that “these tricks can lead to quite unexpected and interesting results”.
LLMs, 1952 edition!
2023
Through the Ages: Apple CPU Architecture (via) I enjoyed this review of Apple’s various CPU migrations—Motorola 68k to PowerPC to Intel x86 to Apple Silicon—by Jacob Bartlett.
2022
Mac OS 8 emulated in WebAssembly (via) Absolutely incredible project by Mihai Parparita. This is a full, working copy of Mac OS 8 (from 1997) running in your browser via WebAssembly—and it’s fully loaded with games and applications too. I played with Photoshop 3.0 and Civilization and there’s so much more on there to explore too—I finally get to try out HyperCard!
2019
Discussion about Altavista on Hacker News. Fascinating thread on Hacker News where Bryant Durrell, a former Director from Altavista provides some insider thoughts on how they lost against Google.
2009
Micro Men. “Affectionately comic drama about the British home computer boom of the early 1980s.”—aired last night, and on BBC iPlayer for the next week. I thought it was absolutely charming, as well as being a thought provoking history of the rise and fall of the British computer industry in the early 80s.
2008
Petition to Save Bletchley Park (via) On the 10 Downing Street petition site so unlike most online petitions this one might actually achieve something (though you must be a British resident to sign).