Homebrew Computer Archaeology
2025-08-05
If one wanted to partake in the archaeology of desktop computing, one might wish to look at archived issues of Dr. Dobb's Journal of Calisthenics and Orthodontia and Byte magazine.
The culture at the time did not contain the concept of open source software. Most programs and language implementations were kept closely guarded as unpublished / unshared trade secrets. Legal nuances for and against retaining intellectual property arose. A relatively small group of "makers" fooled around with this technology at home, building their own desktop computers from scratch - in a “clean room” manner (free of legal encumbrances) - and shared ideas by publishing articles in these magazines.
UNIX became popular because Bell sold UNIX source code licenses to universities. Bell sold the source licences for big $'s - roughly the price of a house. Universities would buy one license and then allow students to read through the code and learn from it. Some students made clandestine copies of UNIX source code. One version of Lion's book had a drawing of students at a photocopier looking over their shoulders while making copies of UNIX source code. Making "digital" copies was impractical, since that would involve reels of mag tape which could only be read on big, non-desktop computers.
Personal Revelations
For me, major revelations were derived by looking at Byte’s Z80 schematic (pg. 62), DDJ’s Tiny Basic (the first Virtual Machine that I encountered) and DDJ's SmallC (the first non-lisp compiler that I encountered) and Frits van der Wateren's Lisp (source code for a runnable Lisp, my first exposure to an implementation of garbage collection) and John R. Allen's book “The Anatomy of Lisp” (the first compiler I encountered, and, the first functional program I encountered) and by building my own machine and TV typewriter and dual cassette storage units and hex keypad made by gutting a Radio Shack calculator and a printer made by gutting a Wang word processor.
Programming Simplicity
I argue that it is easier to understand computers by understanding the early tech instead of current tech which consists of 50+ years of incremental optimizations piled on top of early ideas.
The current trend, anyway, is to offload work to off-board machines, e.g. GPUs, so we don’t need complicated CPUs and general purpose languages anymore.
Smalltalk Blue Book
One might, also, wish to read the Smalltalk Blue Book part 4, too.
The corporate suits decided that Part 4 of the Smalltalk book was too revealing, so they lanced that section and re-released it as the Smalltalk purple book.
The complete book, intact with Part 4, was released later on the internet.
Part 4 uses a subset of Smalltalk to implement Smalltalk and to implement a garbage collector.
See Also
Email: ptcomputingsimplicity@gmail.com
References: https://guitarvydas.github.io/2024/01/06/References.html
Blog: guitarvydas.github.io
Videos: https://www.youtube.com/@programmingsimplicity2980
Discord: https://discord.gg/65YZUh6Jpq
Leanpub: [WIP] https://leanpub.com/u/paul-tarvydas
Twitter: @paul_tarvydas
Substack: paultarvydas.substack.com
Just yesterday, Paul, I was conceiving of & searching for some movement on the internet for a return to computing simplicity. We need people like Wozniak to reboot computing history, parallel to the current state of computing, like a younger sibling who can learn from the mistakes of the older sibling.
Actually I was searching for an institute for technological simplification, since we desperately need this in the realm of automobiles also.
The problem is obviously adoption! People have made home brew z80 kits, etc. A bright light on the horizon is the slow but steady soft rebellion against pervasive social media screen time. The radical types are blazing the trails as we speak.