u/zoki_rijeka_lolica

Hi all,

Commodore 64 kid here. that machine is basically the reason i ended up spending 20+ years as a software architect, and also the reason i fell down a deep rabbit hole into the history of how all this stuff actually came to be.

so i wrote a book about it. its called "Foundations" - ENIAC, Von Neumann, Grace Hopper, birth of Unix, the whole era. 360 pages but its not a textbook, more like something you read on the couch. technical enough to be interesting, hopefully fun enough to actually enjoy. a bit of nostalgia, a few laughs, takes you back to where it all started.

Completley free - first in a series of 8. no email list, no monetization, just a PDF. i wrote it out of love for this stuff, simple as that.

im not a writer, just an engineer who spent way too much time diggin through old archives. based in Croatia so excuse any weird phrasing.

if anyone here appreciates where all this madness came from, hope you enjoy it.

P.S. mention this in the preface too - parts of this book were researched with the help of AI. fact checking, context, surfacing details i might have missed. the structure, the voice and any mistakes that made it through are completley mine.

If you wish to download it, its here on archive.org
https://archive.org/details/history-of-computing-book-1

Thanks.

Hi all,

Commodore 64 kid here. that machine is basically the reason i ended up spending 20+ years as a software architect, and also the reason i fell down a deep rabbit hole into the history of how all this stuff actually came to be.

so i wrote a book about it. its called "Foundations" - ENIAC, Von Neumann, Grace Hopper, birth of Unix, the whole era. 360 pages but its not a textbook, more like something you read on the couch. technical enough to be interesting, hopefully fun enough to actually enjoy. a bit of nostalgia, a few laughs, takes you back to where it all started.

Completley free - first in a series of 8. no email list, no monetization, just a PDF. i wrote it out of love for this stuff, simple as that.

im not a writer, just an engineer who spent way too much time diggin through old archives. based in Croatia so excuse any weird phrasing.

if anyone here appreciates where all this madness came from, hope you enjoy it.

P.S. mention this in the preface too - parts of this book were researched with the help of AI. fact checking, context, surfacing details i might have missed. the structure, the voice and any mistakes that made it through are completley mine.