A magazine about programmers, code, and society. Written by and for humans since 2018.

Check out the Vidéothèque playlist on YouTube!

Derek Muller & Linus Sebastian

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Previous articles in this magazine have explored real-life examples highlighting the insecurity of our modern communications infrastructure. Regular readers might remember the anecdote of an impromptu hacking lesson in the Universidad de Buenos Aires in the year 2000, where our teacher literally intercepted a phone call made by one of the students. The same article goes on to describe how I was able to use a software tool called "CaptureNet" to sniff packets on port 1863 (used by MSN Messenger back in the day) and thus secretly read all the exchanges between my work colleagues in 2001.

Retro Gaming Museum

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Reviewing old computers magazines of yore is a pastime most often associated to retrocomputing enthusiasts. It is part of that feeling of bliss that comes with the realization that there used to be a different world, when software was simpler, when corporations did not have that much power, and when programming languages were more approachable; in short, a more innocent time.

Herb Sutter

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

C++ is under attack. Some argue that it is the language's fault, with those pointers and rules and complexity and undefined behavior, and try once and again to develop a "C++ killer" language, with various degrees of success. Others (rightfully so) defend the language (and its community) by acknowledging its history, its flaws, and proposing ways forward. The former group makes headlines in Reddit and Medium. Instead, the Vidéothèque entry of this month tells the story of a prominent member of the latter group, a certain Herb Sutter.

Bartek Spitza

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Truth or dare! I defy any of my readers to refute this simple fact: watching "The Queen's Gambit" on Netflix during the pandemic made you to either dust out that old chessboard in the attic, or sign up for a chess.com account. I know I did both things, and not only because Anya Taylor-Joy grew up in literally the same neighborhood of Buenos Aires where I did.

Jerry Cain

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

The late 2000s were an interesting time for online education. The wider availability of faster and more reliable bandwidth led to an explosion of online video. This, in turn, led to the emergence of an ever-expanding number of providers of online learning services, and then to a wave of "Massive Open Online Courses" or MOOCs, many of which were offered by large universities and high schools all over the world. This month's Vidéothèque movie is a full playlist featuring one of the earliest (and, in the opinion of this author, one of the most useful) examples of an online programming course.

Mitch Kapor

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Regular readers of this magazine might remember that we opened our issue about Microsoft three years ago with a reference to the D5 conference panel of May 2007, where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs shared the stage with Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg. At the beginning of that event, around minute 07:30 of the recording, you can hear Walt calling out a certain person in the audience.

Tom Scott

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

When Jawed Karim, one of YouTube's co-founders, published the first video ever posted on the platform on April 23rd, 2005, it was hard to imagine that YouTube, at the time just another drop in a sea of Web 2.0 startups, would become 20 years later a media behemoth. YouTube enabled a new generation of "influencers" to turn any conceivable subject into a social phenomenon. This month's Vidéothèque movie is from one of the most beloved of those new stars: Tom Scott.

Donnie Berkholz

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

Let us see a practical (and sad) example of how assholes can bring a software development project to its knees, in this case, Gentoo Linux, a very popular distribution during the pre-Ubuntu years from 2002 to 2006, at which point the project lost almost 20% of their developers in the space of a few years. Why did this happen?

Rob Pike

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

This is the story of four videos by Rob Pike, one of the creators of the Go programming language, each marking important milestones throughout the past 15 years: from the introduction of the language to the world in 2009, to its time of meteoric growth during 2012 and 2015, and finally to a review of the first 14 years of existence in 2023.

Gary Kildall

By Adrian Kosmaczewski,

I had a revelation during the preparation of this article. Legend has it that Gary Kildall, as Forbes put it, "could have been Bill Gates", if it were not that he was busy flying his airplane the day IBM knocked on the door. Most analysts dealing with this foundational moment in computing history, however, leave aside a particular piece of information, which I think explains why IBM chose Microsoft over Digital Research as the provider for the operating system of the original IBM PC, even though Bill Gates himself told IBM to knock on Gary's door instead.

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