This is a bunch of links to computer history pages, research for a book I'm writing. I've provided links to all the originals, as well as local mirrors because I've gotten sick of links going down a year or so after I bookmark them. (I'm sorting through my bookmark list in my copious free time and finding all these dead links from 1998, and it's annoying because some of these were GOOD. Even CNN culls its archives. Sigh...)

If somebody somewhere's getting upset about copyright, feel free to yell at me and I'll take that section of the mirror offline. As for damages, all this stuff is on the internet for free. Your browser caches it. Google caches it. I just want a cache I can rely on.

The mirrors don't always cache the graphics, just the html, and I have yet to grab a single style sheet. They're not supposed to be pretty, just to keep a record of what the link used to point to in case it goes down.

This file grows as I collate more stuff into it. Email rob@landley.net for questions about this.

Rob


Unix History

AT&T Unix

Ken and Dennis' original 1974 announcement of Unix to the world: original local mirror.

Peter Salus, "Unix at 25": Original Local Mirror

Stuff from Dennis Ritchie's home page (Unix co-creator):

Space Travel: Original Local Mirror
Early Unix history and evolution: Original Local Mirror
1976 memo about buying a machine (Interdata 8/32) to be the target of the first port of Unix off the PDP-11: Original Local Mirror
1977 paper on Unix: Original Local Mirror
1978 BSTJ article (reprint of 1974 ACM article): Original Local Mirror
C history: Original Local Mirror
Unix notes from 1972: Original Local Mirror
1980's playing with Cray X/MP Original 1 2 3 Local Mirror 1 2 3
Dennis Ritchie Obituary: Original Local Mirror
Ken Thompson: Reflections on trusting trust: Original Local Mirror

Ken also shows up in the history of computer chess: Original Local Mirror
Interview with Brian Kernighan: Original Local Mirror
Interview with Ken, Dennis, Doug, and Brian: Original Local Mirror
Other Unix history:

Unix history timeline (from "Life with Unix"): Original Local Mirror
Detailed Unix history diagram: Original Local Mirror
Ronda Hauben's History of Unix (see also books): Original Local Mirror

History of SCO: Original Local Mirror

History of SUN: Original Local Mirror

Computing Science Technical Report No. 99 "A History of Computing": Original Local Mirror

Larry McVoy's 1993 paper "The Sourceware Operating System Proposal": Original Local Mirror

The Unix Acronym List (anecdotes): Original Local Mirror (more: bcpl, ping)

PDF of Unix history: Original Local Mirror

X11 version 1 release announcement, september 15, 1987: Original Local Mirror

History chapter from Stephen Bourne's "The UNIX System V Environment": Text

Another nice Unix history timeline: Original Local Mirror

BSD History

A brief history of FreeBSD (from the FreeBSD Handbook): Original Local Mirror
KernelTrap interview with Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD founder): Original Local Mirror
Early BSD versions available here: Original

Article about BSDI: Original Local Mirror

2000 interview with BIll and Lynne Jolitz: Original page 1 page 2 Local Mirror page 1 Page 2


Linux History
A brief history of Linux Original Local Mirror

The Halloween Documents: Halloween 1 (Open Source): Original Local Mirror, Halloween 2 (Linux): Original Local Mirror

A history of Tux, the Linux Penguin: Original Local Mirror

Linux Journal's top 100 events in Linux history Original Local Mirror

Linus' original 1991 announcement, with embarassing photo: Original Local Mirror

Linus's two 1992 postings on Linux history: Original Local Mirror (see also KCLUG archive, here and here.)

1992 interview with Linus: Original Local Mirror

1994 interview with Linus (first issue of Linux-Journal, interview conducted by LJ's original publisher, and later co-founder of Red Hat, Robert Young): Original Local Mirror

Linus's posts on binary modules: 1995 Original Local Mirror

1996 "kissed a girl" email explaining why the Linux community wrote off Sun Microsystems as too dumb to live: Original (archive) Local Mirror

1997 interview with Linux Original Local Mirror

Old photo of Alan Cox: Original Local Mirror

Some early posts culled from the original linux-activits mailing list: 1991 1992

ComputerHope's Unix and Linux history timeline: Original Local Mirror

Initial KDE announcement: Original Local Mirror

The harmony project closes down Jan 26, 1999 Original Local Mirror

Linus Torvalds' 1999 usenix Linux BOF speech Original Local Mirror

Old Linux Journal stories:

Issue 1: interview with Linus about code freeze for 1.0: Original Local Mirror
Issue 1: What's Gnu? Original Local Mirror
Issue 1: article about Debian Original Local Mirror
Issue 2: Formation of the XFree86 Project, Inc. Original Local Mirror
Issue 2: Interview with Patrick Volkerding (Slackware): Original Local Miror
Issue 2: A survey of early Linux distributions: Original Local Mirror
Issue 3: Interview with Fred Van Kempen, author of Net2 Original Local Mirror
Issue 4: Linus Torvalds at DECUS 94: Original Local Mirror
Issue 4: Wine from 1994: Original Local Mirror

Ulrich Drepper (glibc maintainer) complains about Richard Stallman rewriting history and hijacking glibc: Original Local Mirror


Computer history timelines

Motorola's own history timeline Original Local Mirror.

About.com's excellent "History of modern computers and their inventors": Original Local Mirror

Triumph of the Nerds PBS series from http://www.pbs.org/nerds

Timeline Page 1: Original Local Mirror
Timeline Page 2: Original Local Mirror
Timeline Page 3: Original Local Mirror
Timeline Page 4: Original Local Mirror
Timeline Page 5: Original Local Mirror

The Perl Timeline: Original Local Mirror

A brief history of O'Reilly publishing: Original Local Mirror

Xerox Parc History: Original Local Mirror


The internet

Very first website ever, at original URL: Original

The Hobbes Internet Timeline: Original Local Mirror

The PBS internet timeline: Original Local Mirror

Timelines from Robot Wisdom: Original Local Mirror

The history of email at MIT: Original Local Mirror

History of Netscape: Original Local Mirror
History of IE: Original Local Mirror

Google's history of itself: Original Local Mirror
Citations on dismantling the NSFNET Acceptable Use Policy: Local Mirror.


History of ASCII character code: Original Local Mirror

Heathkit history: Original Local Mirror

Heathkit 50th anniversary article: Original Local Mirror

Heathkit's EC-1 educational analog computer: Original Local Mirror


IBM
Interview with John Cocke, inventor of RISC: Original Local Mirror (more)
Dan Bricklin (inventory of Visicalc):
The guy who invented ctrl-alt-delete: Original Local Mirror
The IBM 650: Original Local Mirror

A note about IBM's Object Code Only initiative: Original Local Mirror

The Iron Penguicon (History of VM and 360, more on OCO announcement of February 8, 1983): Original Local Mirror

The Object Code Only (OCO) Policy announcement letter, number 283-016 dated February 8, 1983: Original Local Mirror

How MS got the DOS contract: Original Local Mirror (see also the book "Big Blues")


OS/2 users became Linux users through two channels:

1) They became Java users, and were led to Linux by the netscape source code release.

2) OS/2 became a unix port thanks to EMX (glibc and gcc port) and XFree86-OS/2.

XFree86-OS/2: Original Local Mirror
Personal Correspondence with Holger Veit

List of X programs at one time ported to OS/2: Original Local Mirror If EMX ever had a home page, it's gone. Now you know why I mirror stuff...

History of OS/2: Original Local Mirror
History of OS/2 Warp (3.0 and up): Original Local Mirror
Detailed history of OS/2: Original Local Mirror


Netware: A brief history of netware: Original Local Mirror


Commodore

Interview with Bob Yannes (inventor of the SID chip): Original Local Mirror

Jim Butterfield historical recollections (July 91 "dusty crystal ball"): Original Local Mirror

Gavin Haines on the Amiga 600 (Jan 1993): Original Local Mirror

A history of the Amiga:

Dave Haynie interview: Original Local Mirror
Joe Griffin on the Commodore PET (Jan 1988): Original Local Mirror
Joe Griffin on printers for the PET (May 1988): Original Local Mirror

The GEOS page: Original Local Mirror

Wikipedia articles on:
Commodore 64 Original Local Mirror
MOS Technologies Original Local Mirror


Java

The Long Strange Trip to Java: Original Local Mirror

James Gosling interview after leaving Snoracle: Transcript (Original, Local Mirror), audio (original, Local Mirror).


Intel

IEEE interview Masatoshi Shima (of Busicom): Original Local Mirror

Stanford interview with Ted Hoff (inventor of 4004): Original Local Mirror

Stanford interview with Federico Faggin: Original Local Mirror

Stanford interview with Gordon Moore: Original Local Mirror

Scientific American interviews Gordon Moore (Moore's Law): Original 1 2 3 4 Local Mirror 1 2 3 4

Byte article by Federico Faggin: Original Local Mirror

Processor specs quick reference (4004-Pentium 4): Original Local Mirror

Processor Technical Specifications (by decade): Original Local Mirror

PC Mechanic CPU History Original Local Mirror page 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11
Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present: Original Local Mirror
30th anniversary of MCM/70 (canadian computer based on 8008): Original Local Mirror
More on MCM/70: Original Local Mirror

See interviews section: Masatoshi shima, Ted Hoff, Gordon Moore, Federico Faggin.


Microsoft
Microsoft acquisition timeline: Original Local Mirror
Detailed chronological timeline, with citations: Original Local Mirror

Pays $8 million to end agreement with spyglass over I.E: Original Local Mirror

Timeline of microsoft ship dates: Original Local Mirror

1980 audio interview with Bill Gates Original Local Mirror, transcript Original Local Mirror, Context Original Local Mirror

1989 audio interview with Bill Gates Original Local Mirror, Parent page

Microsoft timeline: Original Local Mirror

Obituary for Bob Wallace: Original Local Mirror

Windows NT and VMS, the rest of the story: Original Local Mirror

History of NT through 2003: Original Local Mirror part one two

Internal MS writeup on the migration of hotmail to NT: Original Local Mirror

Screenshot history of Windows: Original Local Mirror (Memo: clean this up).

Microsoft's legal history (scp, mits, apple, ftc, doj): Original Local Mirror

The original reason for the Microsoft antitrust trial, NT license terms preventing non-MS servers from running on NT: Original (one two three) Local Mirror: one two three)

Article about how one guy (David Weise) made Windows 3.0 actually work, to Microsoft's surprise: Original Local Mirror


Claude Shannon dies at 84: Original Local Mirror


Digital Research

History of CP/M Original Local Mirror

Obituaries of Ed Roberts, founder of MITS (Altair): Original 1 Local Mirror 1, Original 2 Local Mirror 2.

GEM desktop Original Local Mirror

Digital Research gets bought by Novell: 1 2 3 Local Mirror: 1 2 3

History of the CP/M Users Group Northwest: Original Local Mirror

Gordon Eubanks' Recollections of Gary Kildall: Original Local Mirror

PDF Interview with Gordon Eubanks: Original Local Mirror

Tim Paterson:


PC Magazine 20th anniversary special: Original Local Mirror

Turbo C ship dates: Original (google mirror) Local Mirror


The BBS culture

History of Opus-CBCS: Original Local Mirror

History of Fidonet echomail: Original Local Mirror

History of Fidonet (bush): Original Local Mirror

History of Fidonet (jennings): Original part one two Local mirror part one two


Atari

Link to Atari Museum article list

NY Times: Industry Doubts: Atari (May 1985) Original Local Mirror
1981 Business Week Article: Atari's Bet on Home Computers Original Local Mirror
The Atari Sweet 16 Project Original Local Mirror
"Two Births" By Bill Wilkinson Original Local Mirror
Atari's 10th Anniversary Article: From Cutoffs to Pinstripes Original Local Mirror
Atari 8-Bit: Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) Original Local Mirror
Atari 8-Bit Upgrade/Modification FAQ Original Local Mirror
Robert A. Jung's Atari Timeline Original Local Mirror
TOP SECRET: Confidential Atari-Amiga Agreement Original Local Mirror
Parallel Bus Interface: Specifications (Feb. 3, 1983) Original Local Mirror
The Creator of GEM: Gary Kildall of DRI Original Local Mirror
Atari Star Raiders Advertisement Original Local Mirror
The 30 Secrets of Atari Original Local Mirror
Atari's Mass Burials and Misplaced Inventories Original Local Mirror
Atari TV Commercial Listing Original Local Mirror
Cloak & Dagger: The Inside Story Original Local Mirror
Spring 1979 Letter from Ray Kassar Original Local Mirror
Atari: Christmas 1978 Original Local Mirror
Sneak Peek: Atari's Game Room Original Local Mirror
The Real "STELLA" Original Local Mirror
Atari PCB Facility (1979) Original Local History
Atari's IBM 370-148 Mainframe Original Local Mirror
Interview: Joe Decuir (2600 Design/Atari SIO Design) Original Local Mirror
Odd Couple Puts Lionel on the Fast Track Original Local Mirror
The Bold Move Forward: IBM and Jaguar 64 Original Local Mirror
Aug 20, 1993: Atari makes comeback with new video game Original Local Mirror
Nov 4, 1993: Video Market no longer a 2 player game Original Local MirrorOriginal Local Mirror
Sept 28, 1994: Atari Press Release, Sega Agreement Part 2 Original Local Mirror
Hasbro Releases Rights to Publish Jaguar 64 Games!!! Original Local Mirror
What went right at Atari. By Bill Haslacher Original Local Mirror


Games

Early MUD History: Original Local Mirror

Interview with computer gaming pioneer Scott Adams: Original Local Mirror

Interview with Ed Logg of Tengen: Original Local Mirror

Nintendo's corporate history: Original (more)
Videogames.com's history of Nintendo: Original (more)
Planet Nintendo, history of nintendo: Original Local Mirror
Nintendo history: Original Local Mirror
Another nintendo timeline: Original Local Mirror

Interview with John Mathieson, creator of Atari's Jaguar: Original Local Mirror


Books Online

Howard Rheingold's "Tools for Thought": Original Local Mirror

Rhonda Hauben's "Netizens": Original Local Mirror

Bruce Sterling's "The Hacker Crackdown": Original Local Mirror

Open Sources: Original Local Mirror

The New Hacker's Dictionary/Jargon File: Original Local Mirror

Andrew Lenard's in-progress book: Original Local Mirror

Free as in Freedom, biography of Richard Stallman: Original Local Mirror


Categorize this:

Institutional memory and reverse smuggling: Original Local mirror.

KC's Computer Closet: Original

History of Tandy and Radio Shack: Original Local Mirror

History of djgpp: Original Local Mirror

Richard Stallman announces GNU project, Sep 27, 1983: Original Local Mirror

Richard Stallman's 1986 speech to Royal Institute of Technology in Sweden Original Local Mirror

July 1986 Byte interview with Stallman Original Local Mirror

PDP 8 FAQ: Original Local Mirror

Martin Angrove's Acorn pages: Original Local Mirror

ComputerHope's intel CPU information: Original Local Mirror

A macintosh view of PC history (take with grain of salt): Original Local Mirror

ZX81 FAQ: Original Local Mirror

Google's index of their 20 year usenet archive: Original

Intel's 30th anniversary retrospective: Original Local Mirror

New York Times article on punched cards Original Local Mirror

Wired on punched cards Original Local Mirror

Steven Lubar's history of punched cards (smithsonian) Original Local Mirror

Douglas W. Jones' punched card collection (University of Iowa): Original Local Mirror

Brief interview with Dave Cutler about origins of NT Original Local Mirror

A good article on the rise and fall of OS/2: Original Local Mirror

20th anniversary of PC from cnet: Original Local Mirror

Timeline of the history of magnetic storage: Original Local Mirror

Al Shugart speech Original Local Mirror

Rey Johnson, "The first disk" Original Local Mirror

Al Hoagland's talk on disk history: Original Local Mirror

Another al hoagland presentation on disk hostory (use xpdf, the kde pdf viewer goes nuts on this file): Original local mirror

History of the GUI: Original Local Mirror

J.C.R. Licklider's papers (Man-Computer Symbiosis, The Computer as a Communications Device) in PDF format: Original Local Mirror

New York Times article on Bulova Accutron, first successful transistorized watch (1961): Original Local Mirror

Brief history of ncurses: Original Local Mirror

Anecdote about when Grace Hopper's "bug" story got out: Original Local Mirror

Operating Systems Through Time (8-bits): Original Local Mirror

History of teletype deveopment: Original Local Mirror

Ralf Brown's interrupt list: Original Local Mirror

Adam Osborne obituary: Original Local Mirror

1995 comparison of Linux vs Coherent: Original Local Mirror

Steve Jobs bought Pixar from George Lucas for $10 million in 1986 Original Local Mirror

Interview with John Sculley, ex-CEO of Apple: Original Local Mirror

20th anniversary of Minitel, France's AOL: Original Local Mirror


Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)

Smithsonian Interview with Ken Olsen, founder of Digital Equipment Corporation Original Local Mirror

Gordon Bell's DEC Museum: Original Local Mirror

Gordon Bell talk at Monticello: Original Local Mirror

History of DEC's vt line: Original Local Mirror

Columbia's DECSYSTEM-20, plus history of kermit: Original Local Mirror

Dan Bricklin on inventing visicalc:Original Local Mirror

A brief History of ClarisWorks: Original Local Mirror

Phil Zimmerman Profiled: Original Local Mirror

Bill Joy interviewed upon leaving Sun: Original Local Mirror page one, two three

Andrew Tridgedell on the history of Samba: Original Local Mirror

1997 History of Samba: Original Local Mirror

Houston chronicle picks the top 10 personal computers of all time: Original Local Mirror

History of Viruses: Original Local Mirror

Andy Hertzfeld's history site (the rest of the industry, from Apple's perspective): Original (Remind me to mirror this when it's not slashdotted.)

10th anniversary of GnuPG

History of GNU HURD: original Local Mirror (1 2 3)

The History of Python: blog by Guido Van Rossum

Esther Dyson's 1998 newsletter about Linux: Original Local Mirror


To do:

Grab http://www.rtty.com/history/nelson.htm

Collate bookmarks with collate

Collate http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/ with interviews/more

Order BSD history video from Marshall McKusick's website:

http://www.mckusick.com/history/index.html

And maybe the Berkeley CSRG archive cd-rom set:

http://www.mckusick.com/csrg/index.html

Find originals for:

apple/a2hist.zip
interviews/sj1.html

Follow up on http://gamespot.com/gamespot/features/video/hov/p11_01.html

Go through cringely archives

Go through bookmarks.

Sort and categorize a lot better...

http://www.livinginternet.com/?i/is_crypt_pkc_inv.htm
http://www2.educ.umu.se/~bjorn/mhonarc-files/obsolete/msg00032.html
http://www.tuhs.org/anecdotes.html
Integrate kc archives (1991, 1992)

Research X history, XFree86 history.  David Dawes?

Research Small C compiler by Jim Hendrix.  (8080, etc.)

http://www.philo75.com/

Difficult to mirror:

http://vt100.net/timeline/
http://www.nvg.ntnu.no/sinclair/contents.htm

Gorp to be sorted:
http://www.facsnet.org/tools/sci_tech/tech/fundaments/mooreslaw.php3
History of the integrated circuit:
http://www.icknowledge.com/history/1970s.html

"From Airline Reservations to Sonic the Hedgehog: A History of the Software Industry" (MIT Press, $29.95), Martin Campbell-Kelly

Post on history of Novell and Ray Noorda:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=56225&cid=5462761

Snippet about Jim Allchin doing Unix at Banyan:
http://linuxtoday.com/news_story.php3?ltsn=2003-03-07-019-26-OP-BZ-CD&tbovrmode=1#talkback_area

http://ms.tark.us/

http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/

http://www.gaby.de/ehome.htm

http://www.archive.org/movies/movieslisting-browse.php?collection=computerchronicles

http://www.smalltalk.org/alankay.html

http://lwn.net/1999/features/1998timeline/
http://lwn.net/Articles/16858/
http://lwn.net/2001/features/Timeline/
http://lwn.net/2000/features/Timeline/
http://lwn.net/1999/features/Timeline/

http://members.fortunecity.com/pcmuseum/alto.html

http://www.byte.com/art/

http://apple2history.org/museum/ads/ads.html
http://www.textfiles.com/
http://www.commodore.ca/products/kim1/mos_kim1.htm
http://www.atariarchives.org/deli/

http://everymac.com/
http://www.apple-history.com/
http://apple.computerhistory.org/stories/storyReader$15
Book: Apple Confidential 2.0: The Definitive History of the World's Most Colorful Company
Why the mac's early name was "Bicycle": http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=94412&cid=8097663&pid=8097663&mode=nested
http://www.byte.com/art/9509/sec7/art19.htm
http://museum.sysun.com/museum/althist.html

The following link contains a bunch of files I downloaded in 2002, but which never got indexed. Unfortunately, the original link locations were lost in a disk crash. I need to track down where they came from in order to link them in above with original/local mirror locations.

BIG HEAP OF UNSORTED STUFF

First microprocessor:

That's about 1 million times the transistors, 25k times the frequency, 40x the chip size, and 1/200th the component size.

Video: Linus Torvalds interviewed about 20th anniversary/Linux 3.0

1.0 - networking works
1.2 - multiplatform
2.0 - smp
2.2 - spinlocks