Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
In his magnificent history of the origins of modern computing, Turing’s Cathedral, George Dyson notes that some of the earliest thinkers about digital computing realized that the spread of “codes”—that is, programs—from computer to computer is akin to the spread of viruses, and perhaps of more complex living organisms, that take over a host and put
... See moreTim O'Reilly • Wtf?
Handwriting recognition software had to recognize a wide variety of writing styles. That necesssarily required complex code. And at the time even the best handwriting software—the software in the Newton was state-of-the-art—was not very good. Palm decided to reverse the logic. Rather than having software learn how to recognize people’s handwriting,
... See moreDavid S. Evans • Invisible Engines: How Software Platforms Drive Innovation and Transform Industries
Clearly, just imprinting a document in clay is not enough to guarantee efficient, accurate and convenient data processing.
Yuval Noah Harari • Sapiens
Livingston: Was the code tuned to the IBM machine? Kapor: It was tuned to the Intel 808X 16-bit architecture. And Sachs was also very, very good. He was just an artist at high performance with limited resources. I didn't know how good he was; I got lucky. I knew he was good, but he was a genius at this sort of stuff. The two of us together was
... See moreJessica Livingston • Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
Well over a billion dollars had gone into developing this operating system, an investment that continues today with no realistic possibility of a return. The technique works well as long as enough money pours in to buoy up moribund projects. But by mid-1989, IBM was so laden with the walking dead that its highly profitable mainframe monopoly could
... See moreJerry Kaplan • Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure
A programmer, for example, instead of chugging along maintaining and updating an existing piece of software, could write a whole new piece of software, and with it create a new source of revenue.
Paul Graham • Hackers & Painters: Big Ideas from the Computer Age
He regularly invited top computer scientists to his office to explain emerging trends in hardware and software. He had three home computers. He was typing a future bestseller, Earth in the Balance, on an early laptop. He went to computer-industry conferences, wrote articles for Scientific American, and fluently spoke the language of VLSI and AI,
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