A clothing company writing about computer history
Which is either the strangest thing about this or the least interesting.
We make clothes about developer culture. A 418. A null byte. A card with holes in it. That only works if you genuinely love the material, and the quickest way to find out whether someone does is to ask them where any of it came from.
So we went and read. Almost none of it is lost. Computing is about eighty years old, which means its founding decisions were made by people who wrote down what they were thinking, in papers and RFCs and memos that are still sitting there. Some of them are still alive to ask. The material is not missing. It is just not read.
These are the ones we wanted to bring to life, and then interpret, because a design is an interpretation and it ought to be built on something true. One subject per piece, taken back to the primary document. Where there is no primary document, which happens more often than you would like, we say so.
Some of them end up on a garment. That is the least interesting thing about them.
The "I'm not a robot" checkbox was never asking you anything
A box that judges your browser, not your answer. The click is a formality.
RFC 1149: the day a Norwegian Linux group pinged a host by pigeon
An April Fools' internet standard from 1990 says you can send IP packets by bird. In 2001 some people in Bergen actually did it.
What is a breakpoint? The only red dot on your screen that takes orders
Reality ships with a UX you did not write. Your code is the one screen where you set the controls.
Why is it called a 404 error? The number is blaming you
There was no room 404 at CERN. The real reason is in the first digit, and it is a little bit rude.
Your fingers got there first
A developer needed to get through his own game. Forty years later, his shortcut still lives.
Your laptop is descended from a loom, and it has never got over it
The company is called Binary & Thread because it sounded good. Turns out the name was just accurate, two hundred years late.
It was always going to be DNS
Before 1983 the entire internet's list of names was one file, and you got the new version by asking someone to send it to you.
Nobody invented the stack
At least three people did, separately, without knowing about each other. And the word everybody uses for it was coined later, by a fourth.
Now they have two problems
Software's most quoted line is real, posted on a Tuesday in 1997. Its author was recycling a nine-year-old joke.
The first smiley had to be excavated
It was posted in 1982, nobody kept a copy, and it took a sponsored dig through twenty-year-old backup tapes to get it back.
The joke that would not die
A 1998 April Fools' RFC gave teapots a code for refusing coffee. It outlived most serious protocols from that year.
The most expensive byte in computing
Somebody decided how computers know where text stops. Nobody wrote it down, and we have paid for it since 1969.
Unless work is done
Everyone blames entropy for code rot. The man who measured how programs change made the comparison himself, then refused to let it explain the result.
