A Year of 379 Computer Days

"A Year of 379 Computer Days" (Y379) presents a historical overview of computing which sidesteps less compelling details, replacing them with refreshing dollops of trivia and humor.

I hasten to add that I have strenuously aimed to be technically accurate, as typified by books such as A History of Modern Computing by Paul E. Ceruzzi, but felt free to add jokes and quirky facts that would be happy inside The New Hacker's Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond. It's been a difficult balancing act, especially since I've a sincere admiration for the computing pioneers. I was for many years an amateur juggler, which may further reassure you.

I've moved away from a presentation in terms of eras, towards one with less structure that allows the reader to jump in at any day and follow paths of their choosing. I've employed a calendar-based format, which may seem like a 'serious' organization, but really isn't. It allows me to juxtapose unrelated events from the last 50-100 years which happen to have occurred on the same day.

The 'paths' take the form of dated references. For instance, the entry for the Refrigerator Ladies [May 00] has links to [May 31] and [Nov 30], which concern other matters related to the ENIAC. However, each date has an average of eight entries, which makes it very hard to resist striking off at a tangent once you land on a day. Consider the entry for the VIC-20 which offers links to Commodore [Oct 10], Jack Tramiel [Dec 13], and William Shatner [March 22] (James T. Kirk of Star Trek [Sept 8]).

In other words, this approach is not intended to present a grandiose progression of giant leaps forward (with subheadings such as "The Birth of Artificial Intelligence"), but present a mosaic (or, if you prefer, a jigsaw).

You may have noticed that the [xxx]'s are not hyperlinks (and will never be). Instead, you'll have to manually backtrack to the main calendar page and then explicitly click on the "xxx" date link. This is intentional, to encourage browsing.

As the title suggests, there are 379 dates here - 366 days, 12 monthly entries, and a catch-all "unknown" for important occasions that I couldn't pin to a particular day or month. Each day is typically represented by a PDF file of 2 to 3 pages, usually with one image per page. However, the month-based entries (e.g. [May 00]) tend to be double that length.

I hope to add new entries to the main calendar page at the rate of one month per month, finishing sometime next year (2021). What you'll see is a second draft, which I sincerly hope is mostly error free. If you do find any errors (heaven forbid), please contact me at the email address below, and I'll endevour to fix matters as soon as possible. Also, if you have suggestions for improvements, please contact me as well.