Where We Came From

I had many favorite books when I was growing up, but one has always stuck with me. The book is The Cartoon Guide to Computer Science by the great Larry Gonick. It traces the history of computer science and explains how logic gates work, why a computer subtracks by adding, and why sloths count in binary. it’s as good as David Macaulay’s The Way Things Work which is, after all, the greatest book ever written. (The Way Things Work rates slightly higher, on account of its sheer inexhaustibility.)

When I arrived at Bard College as a freshman, I wanted to study Computer Science History. I had stories of Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, and Alan Turing bubbling in my mind. I wanted to learn more about where it all came from. What happy accidents and brilliant insanities had built on top of one another to construct our modern computational world?

No one would teach me the history of computer science, so I settled for what I could pick up on my own. Soon I discovered the computational pioneers of the modern era. I learned how Alan Kay created Objects; how his GUI at PARC inspired Steve Jobs and Apple to create the Macintosh, which in turn inspired Windows and set the standard for computer interfaces; how his Smalltalk inspired Objective-C and Ruby, which was also highly influenced by John McCarthy’s Lisp. I learned how Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman built the two great empires of Free Software, Linux and GNU, living in symbiosis, and leading the way for the Open-Source Movement. I learned of giants, gods, and titans, and I learned that they were my ancestors. And then I realized something:

These people are still alive.

This still boggles my mind. These are great men and women of history, and they’re not dead yet. We can still go ask them questions. We can even work with them, learn directly from them. How lucky we are to live in an age of such rapid change that our Great Old Ones are still among us!

May we young grasshoppers be wise enough to seek their wisdom.

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Corey Haines is touring the country pairing with all sorts of great programmers. As he’s travelled, he’s filmed a series called “Road Thoughts”. In his latest entry, Corey discusses the importance of learning and remembering our history. I think he’s absolutely right.