First: my wholehearted thank you to Luna. I could not have written this without her help. Go follow her blog for good writing about computers. It turns out you can learn a lot from computers just by looking at them. This involves a clever and litigious company, trademark law, a microscope, nitric acid, and one very dedicated materials science student. Here’s the thing about gameboys: When a Nintendo Game Boy boots up, the Nintendo® logo scrolls down the screen.…

It’s May and it’s just spring here, which is the right time to write to you about a particular folk song. It’s a May Day song, really, the Old May Day, a song for long days and the beginning of summer. It’s a song about getting up before everyone else and feeling full of yourself over it. It’s a song about a warm morning. It also shares a verse with As You Like It, which is real weird.…

Here’s the thing about telegraphs: Sometimes, telegraph operators had bad days. This was usually for mundane reasons. A telegraph pole down. Electrical failures: too much current, burnt wire insulation, or maybe over-curious sheep near the ground return. On September 2nd, 1859, many telegraph operators had a worse-than-usual day. It looked like this: That is how the astronomer Richard Carrington drew a truly immense solar storm. It was the kind of thing that would kill all of the electric grids, everywhere, should it hit today.…

Here’s the thing about computers: There are 60 things that you can do with arrays. Here they are: These are ALL of the things that you can do with arrays. This is the language APL. That stands for “A Programming Language.” The complete ungoogleability of that name wasn’t a problem at the time; it was proposed forty-odd years before google. These are not the letters of the language: these are its words.…