- The Early History of Usenet, Part I: Prologue (cs.columbia.edu)
November 2019 is, as best I can recall, the 40th anniversary of the conception of Usenet. (What’s Usenet? The Wikipedia article is ok but not perfect.) I should have written a proper paper; instead, there will (probably) be an irregular series of blog posts. I’ll do Part I of N tonight.
- How the ARPANET Protocols Worked (twobithistory.org)
The ARPANET changed computing forever by proving that computers of wildly different manufacture could be connected using standardized protocols. In my post on the historical significance of the ARPANET, I mentioned a few of those protocols, but didn’t describe them in any detail. So I wanted to take a closer look at them. I also wanted to see how much of the design of those early protocols survives in the protocols we use today.
- Fugue (Wikipedia)
In classical music, a fugue (/fjuːɡ/) is a contrapuntal, polyphonic compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject (a musical theme) that is introduced at the beginning in imitation (repetition at different pitches), which recurs frequently throughout the course of the composition. It is not to be confused with a fuguing tune, which is a style of song popularized by and mostly limited to early American (i.e. shape note or “Sacred Harp”) music and West Gallery music. A fugue usually has three main sections: an exposition, a development, and a final entry that contains the return of the subject in the fugue’s tonic key. Fugues can also have episodes—parts of the fugue where new material is heard, based on the subject—a stretto, when the fugue’s subject “overlaps” itself in different voices, or a recapitulation. A popular compositional technique in the Baroque era, the fugue was fundamental in showing mastery of harmony and tonality as it presented counterpoint.
- ARPANET (Wikipedia)
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foundation of the Internet. The ARPANET was established by the Advanced Research Projects Agency (now DARPA) of the United States Department of Defense.