Technical Time Travel: On Vintage Programming Books

https://tiemoko.com/blog/vintage-tech-books/

by fagnerbrack • 4 years ago

142 92 4 years ago

ModernMech• 4 years ago

I love vintage programming books. Interlibrary loan has been my best friend in getting books you can’t find easily, or if you do they might be over $100 to buy.

dhosek4• 4 years ago

I remember being in high school in the 80s and discovering that there was source code for a C compiler on the IBM mainframe at UIC. Then when I started digging into it, I found that parts of it were written in SNOBOL. Fortunately, the local public library's collection of computer books was hopelessly outdated and they had a book that covered SNOBOL on their shelves.

criddell2• 4 years ago

Would Knuth's TAOCP series be considered a vintage programming books?

tomcart• 4 years ago

There is surely a distinction between vintage and timeless, where the first is representative of the time it was written (and may offer relevant insight for today), and the second offers some universal truth, regardless of when it was written.

I'd say Knuth is squarely in the latter category

decebalus14• 4 years ago

I'm gonna have to go against the grain here and completely disagree with this. While TAOCP is lauded and celebrated as one of the best (and at the same time unread) CS books of all time, the fact that it uses an assembly language is a strong indicator that it's 'vintage'. It still has that 'universal truth' but at the same time, as you said 'is representative of the time it was written', considering MIX is picked for teaching people how to program.

chungy• 4 years ago

First editions, probably. The current ones not so much.

Although I guess Volumes 1-3 haven't yet had their MIX code replaced with MMIX, so perhaps even the current ones are vintage.

crims0n• 4 years ago

Not only is it an interesting pastime, it can be quite useful for older languages. I am currently working my way through some of the recommendations in "The Definitive C Book Guide and List" from StackOverflow and a lot of the selections are from decades past.

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/562303/the-definitive-c-...

tluyben22• 4 years ago

I read many computer books and magazines from the 60s, 70s and 80s. It is really interesting from many sides; some logic explanation books from that era I find better programming beginner explanations than modern books. Modern books usually skip rigid logic introductions but are more about tooling, hello world and then more examples of practically implementing working solutions with that knowledge. Which contains a lot of plumbing including logic but gives the beginning programmer the idea that low level stuff is somehow mashed in with the high level stuff. I had many juniors crash on that; they cannot keep them apart at first and worry about implementation details while the actual logic/algo basically has in no way at all formed in their head.

Even in asm books they would show flowcharts of the logic first and then try to implement those flowcharts while many modern things assume you have that global idea and jump right into the details.

I never sweat the details until I need to which seems to make me a child of those times, which I am of course.

On the flip side, these old books also discuss far more low level stuff, some to the gates level.

agumonkey2• 4 years ago

Similarly, vintage army videos about analog computers, mechanical couplings (hydraulic, differential) or even waves are extremely high quality. Practical yet precise enough.

hnthrowaway03153• 4 years ago

Exactly. I found myself fascinated about these vintage army videos. Vintage training videos from the 70s/80s are also very good. Compact, effective, no bullshit, and occasionally a sense of humor.

actionfromafar2• 4 years ago

I wonder how much of that is because of the medium. You had to film it, with film.

The film itself cost money. You had only a certain amount of it on-set.

You then had to wait for it to be developed to see how it turned out.

You had to synch audio to it, so you had to really think about what you wanted to say and for how long.

Finally, the distributed product had a standard length for distribution. (The reels sent out.)

userbinator• 4 years ago

Not just army; plenty of civilian ones too. Here's an HN favourite:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15122031

JKCalhoun3• 4 years ago

Somewhat related? "Soap Bubbles" (C. V. Boys) [1] was a book from over 100 years ago that reads like a series of lectures to a science class on the physics of soap bubbles.

I was impressed with the step-wise manner in which the book proceeds from simple observations of soap bubbles and how they behave in order to develop more complex theories as to why they behave that way and the physics behind it.

Logic can feel so refreshing sometimes.

1) https://www.arvindguptatoys.com/arvindgupta/soap-bubbles-boy...

gotaquestion• 4 years ago

Agreed! I have a 6502 Assembly Cookbook from 1980. It is mostly about how to do floating point math on a 6502, and it is full of flowcharts which very cleanly introduce and build much more advanced concepts in a simple way. It was a wonderful bridge for me between application and theory when I read it ... 40 years ago as a highschool student without internet.

asdff5• 4 years ago

Do you have some recommendations of some accessible stuff and also some of the to the gates level stuff?

tluyben22• 4 years ago

I will check tomorrow as I have these as actual physical books. The best one I have is a Dutch book but it might be a translation; I will try to find it.

Klaster_12• 4 years ago

Can anyone help me find the book? I remember it vividly as a child in 90s, translated into russian, so not new. It had very distinct illustrations with lots of pointing fingers rolling on wheels (pointers?) and samples of same program in different programming languages, like Lisp or Fortran.

EdwardCoffin• 4 years ago

I'm trying to find a book that sounds similar, one I read in the mid-1980s, in English. Can you recall any more details? I don't particularly recall distinct illustrations from mine, but they could have been there. I am sure the one I read had Fortran, Basic, Assembler, Forth, Apl, and PL/1. I'm not sure mine had the same program for each language, but the theme seemed to be giving a taste of each language, but not getting too deep into any of them. I think the one I am trying to find had a mostly orange cover and was a hardcover-sized paperback.

Klaster_12• 4 years ago

I don't really remember much about the contents, it was too advanced and foreign for me back then. It was hard cover, pages of about A4 size, the cover was gray with thin white horizontal lines. One of the pages contained the famous photo of "first actual case of a bug". The illustrations were in the 80s corporate style with subtle gradients.

markus_zhang• 4 years ago

Great post! I'm wondering if the original BIOS manual still useful for today's, say, malware reaearchers?

bombcar3• 4 years ago

Sometimes original codepaths (such as BIOS) are still present in modern machines, but basically forgotten. In those cases you may be able to execute code that hasn't been tested/expected in quite awhile.

However, I think the raw BIOS functions don't work in extended mode, but I may be wrong.

hnthrowaway03153• 4 years ago

Thanks, I know nothing about the BIOS and other related hardware topics. Does "extended mode" mean UEFI? I guess an introductory OS lecture is going to be helpful.

sillyquiet• 4 years ago

Tangentially (?) I would not underestimate the impact the manuals of various early computers had on young programmers.

I wore my Vic 20 manual out copying out programs from it while learning not only BASIC but some pretty fundamental stuff about computer architecture. It was so significant to me I had to buy a copy from eBAY decades later to keep on my shelf.

kjellsbells• 4 years ago

i assert that the very practice of typing listings from books and magazines back in the day was exactly the sort of slow paced repetition that was required for really deep memorization. i can still remember PEEK and POKE from BBC Basic 40 years later.

BaseballPhysics7• 4 years ago

A bit of an aside:

"Clean-room design" was an underhanded way to legally reverse engineer and clone a competitor's product. It works like this: engineer A produces a specification after studying the competing product, a lawyer signs off on the spec not including copyrighted material, and engineer B re-implements the product from the spec A created. A and B have the same employer, but since they're not the same person there's technically no copyright infringement. This technique was used during the fiercely-competitive market rush of early personal computing.

What a weird way to position this.

There's nothing "underhanded" about it. There is literally no copyright infringement in this case. It's pure reverse engineering as is done in many other industries and fields.

And the outcome is increased interoperability and improved competition by eliminating artificial barriers of entry in the market. Without it, the computing world would be a very different place, and I doubt anyone would like it.

In fact, the market was far from "fiercely competitive" prior to the IBM BIOS being reverse engineered. Before that work was done, IBM basically had a lock on the PC market. It wasn't until the clone rush of the 80s that prices came down and computing became accessible to everyone. Hell, IBM valued that near-monopoly so much they introduced the MCA bus in the hopes of locking the PC back down. Fortunately their competitors succeeded in establishing open alternatives, including PCI and so forth, and the rest is history.

I wonder how this author feels about the Google v Oracle lawsuit regarding Google's reimplementation of a bunch of core Java APIs...

teh_klev3• 4 years ago

EISA was the rest of the industry's middle finger response to IBM's MCA:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Industry_Standard_Arc...

As a former field engineer I was glad to see the back of MCA.

BaseballPhysics7• 4 years ago

Ah! Thank you! I knew PCI was a later standard, but I'll be damned if I could remember the one that preceded it...

mcguire2• 4 years ago

Hey! Some of us remember the microbus fondly! :-)

99_00• 4 years ago

There is no copyright infringement when an engineer studies a competitors product and pretends that their design is independent?

I don't know if this is a real thing or not (I can see it being real in smaller companies, but incompetent when it comes to these things so what do I know), but that's the case described.

allturtles• 4 years ago

Copyright is the exclusive right to a particular creative expression, traditionally text. If you recreate the same functionality as another program without copying its text, there is no copyright violation. There may be patent infringement, but that's another matter.

BaseballPhysics7• 4 years ago

There is no copyright infringement when an engineer studies a competitors product and pretends that their design is independent?

So long as no actual code was copied, no, there isn't.

An independent re-implementation of an API/interface/whatever for the purpose of interoperability is perfectly legal. This explains the clean-room approach, as it ensures that the developer re-implementing the functionality has absolutely no access to the original code, thus making it impossible for them to engage in copyright infringement (BTW, if you want to watch a fantastic dramatization of this, go watch Halt and Catch Fire. I love the show for a lot of reasons, but their dramatization of the reverse engineering of the PC BIOS was just... so good).

This is why, for example, LibreOffice can go ahead and implement their own Word doc implementation without worrying about Microsoft suing the pants off of them.

It's also why Wine is perfectly legal (though not without controversy when developers have tried to take shortcuts).

Heck, we wouldn't have AMD if this type of thing was illegal! AMD got into the microprocessor market by, yup, reverse engineering the Intel 8080 and cloning it:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Am9080

It was originally produced without license as a clone of the Intel 8080, reverse-engineered by Ashawna Hailey, Kim Hailey and Jay Kumar by photographing an early Intel chip and developing a schematic and logic diagrams from the images.

lostgame• 4 years ago

A great example of this would be called an emulator, and I'd argue that, yes - those are completely independent designs. So does the law. :)

pessimizer• 4 years ago

They don't pretend the design is independent, they explicitly have studied the design. The implementation is independent, because they have not studied the code. The code is what is protected by copyright. The design would be in the realm of patents.

mtVessel• 4 years ago

Something I've never understood is the requirement to have separate people doing the design and the implementation. How does that provide greater legal protection than one person doing the design, a lawyer signing off on it, and that same person doing the implementation?

dkarl• 4 years ago

The person doing the design studies the original product and will likely gain incidental knowledge of how the original product is implemented. The person doing the implementation ideally has no exposure to the implementation of the original product, so they can't copy the original, not even subconsciously.

bdowling2• 4 years ago

Independent creation is a defense to copyright infringement, but only if the accused did not have access to the original work.

In the BIOS cases, this means that the implémenter can produce the exact same assembly code as the original BIOS and it’s not copyright infringement, but only if the implementer never saw the original code.

mcguire2• 4 years ago

The person doing the specification has been "contaminated" by the original's documentation and product; it's possible to argue that they carried over knowledge directly from the original product. The lawyer in the middle establishes a firewall ensuring nothing was taken from the original outside of the specification.

I don't know of any actual cases that hinged on this, but lawyers tend to be belt-and-suspenders types. One remnant is the advice from the GNU folks on building clones of Unix tools---you could even be tainted by looking at the Unix source, as long as the clone was architecturally very different. (Which led to a lot of better implementations of Unix tools...)

not2b• 4 years ago

It's an extra precaution: it guarantees that the people who are doing the implementation never see the original copyrighted work, so copying is impossible.

If the same person reviews the product being cloned, writes a spec, has it reviewed, and does the implementation, the other side can argue that knowledge that was not in the spec was used in the development. They might or might not succeed in this argument, but cautious companies firewall off those who have seen the original product and those who develop the clone, especially if the competing company has a litigious reputation.

therealcamino• 4 years ago

If you've never read "Lord of the Flies", you'll have an easier time convincing people that your new book about a bunch of shipwrecked boys doesn't infringe its copyright.

matheusmoreira2• 4 years ago

You can't possibly have infringed copyright if you never touched the copyrighted material yourself. So companies have other engineers examine that material and produce documentation that you can use to write code. A simple layer of indirection between developers and any legally toxic material.

This is just a popular method to increase the likelihood of success in the event of lawsuit. It's not actually standard, required or anything of the sort. It certainly doesn't prevent competitors from suing you anyway and burning your time and money in court. They can also be awarded an injuction that stops you from making money until the courts decide who's right.

Sony vs Connectix is an example of a company that directly reverse engineered firmware and still won in court but still lost in the market due to an injunction.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment,_I....

the PlayStation firmware fell under a lowered degree of copyright protection because it contained unprotected parts (functional elements) that could not be examined without copying.
While Connectix did disassemble and copy the Sony BIOS repeatedly over the course of reverse engineering, the final product of the Virtual Game Station contained no infringing material.

musicale• 4 years ago

IBM BIOS being reverse engineered

I assume "clean room" BIOS implementations were important to avoid copyright infringement claims since the BIOS source code was actually provided by IBM in the system's technical reference manual (similarly to other systems of the time):

https://retrocomputing.stackexchange.com/questions/12018/why...

Shame that modern vendors don't provide their system firmware source code.

drittich• 4 years ago

I had that exact BIOS Interface Technical Reference manual, which (along with one describing the FAT, I think) were the only technical books that came with my PCjr. I spent the 10 hour drive home after purchasing it reading them, assuming that was the stuff I needed to know.

I subsequently had a quite granular mental map of how higher-level software interacts with the hardware through BIOS and DOS interrupts, and knew a lot more than I generally needed to about where the MBR is stored, disk cluster size, etc.

It was difficult times to learn about computers - no friends used them, there was no internet, so any knowledge acquired was hard-earned, and tended to really stick.

tsumnia• 4 years ago

I actually started a small collection of old children's programming books [1, 2] a few years back. I've done some research regarding "typing practice" for programmers and how older generations did not have the luxury of copy/paste. I think one of the aspects that helped students overcome the technical barrier was the fact they had to reimplement the code themselves, rather than cloning a git repo.

[1] https://boingboing.net/2016/02/07/usborne-releases-free-pdfs...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Adventure

asciimov3• 4 years ago

One of the problems I faced when my family got our first computer in '97 was there was no included programming environment on Win 95, not even a Basic interpreter. I remember my local library was full of those kids programming books with little games you could type in, and I had no way of putting them in and running them.

Worse, the only programming books I could get running back then were those "Learn Java in 24 Hours" style books that came with a cd that included a compiler, but no IDE. I remember giving up after a lesson or two because all I had was notepad to type in the code, and the errors thrown were too complex to understand. (Probably a missed semicolon.)

mysterydip3• 4 years ago

I believe win95 still had qbasic (with its built-in IDE and help/examples) in the Windows folder, but it wasn't in the Start menu anywhere. May have been on the CD instead.

ghaff4• 4 years ago

The FORTRAN Coloring Book is quite the amusing little programming book for the late 70s. https://www2.seas.gwu.edu/~kaufman1/FortranColoringBook/Colo...

What makes it even more amusing is that people on this forum, even if they don't know FORTRAN would find it ludicrously elementary considering it was actually the textbook for an MIT class at the time. (It was basically a programming course for non-CS/EE engineers and the assumption was basically that they had never touched a computer before.)

DerArzt• 4 years ago

That brings to mind the kind of thing that the Poignant Guide to Ruby[1] or Land of Lisp[2] were going for.

[1] https://poignant.guide/book/ [2] http://landoflisp.com/

mysterydip3• 4 years ago

I love vintage game programming books. Just finished "Gardens of Imagination" by Christopher Lampton, and "The Black Art of 3D Game Programming" by Andre Lamothe. Lots of good info in both for my raycaster pet project.

decebalus14• 4 years ago

I sometimes wonder if in the near future we'd have programming historians to dig up old brilliant but forgotten ideas, which were not feasible back then, but might add value now with our new computing capabilities.

Jtsummers• 4 years ago

Artificial neural networks, which underlie most of deep learning, is an example of that. Maybe not totally forgotten, but set aside multiple times in history due to issues around practicality. There are probably a few more of these out there, but it's one of the best known ones.

howard941• 4 years ago

Adam Osborne from Osborne & Assoc. wrote a number of highly readable perfect bound books in the mid 70s in his Introduction to Microcomputers series. Volume I "Basic Concepts" covers everything from gates and truth tables to common assembly language instructions. Later volumes targeted assembly language for specific processors of the day such as the 8080 and 6502. I learned to program from these books (and K&R).

Osborne & Associates went on to sell a portable CP/M machine that was very bulky and heavy but earned the right to be called portable.

topkai22• 4 years ago

This made me think of “Head First Design Patterns”, a book whose content has aged fairly well, but whose cover and typesetting have not.

https://www.amazon.com/Head-First-Design-Patterns-Brain-Frie...

Technical Time Travel: On Vintage Programming Books

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