History blogs

Jamie Zawinski, a veteran programmer of Netscape and Mozilla fame, writes on software, the web, and his own projects.

Top post: The Rise of "Worse is Better"

Raymond Chen, a Microsoft engineer, writes about Windows history, API design quirks, and low-level programming.

Top post: It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway (2006)

Quote Investigator is a research blog by Garson O'Toole that traces the true origins of famous quotations and sayings.

Top post: If I Had More Time, I Would Have Written a Shorter Letter (2012)

Andy Hertzfeld and collaborators tell first-person stories from the development of the original Apple Macintosh in the early 1980s.

Top post: -2000 Lines of Code

The blog of a data-driven content company, publishing stories on economics, pricing, and business history, such as the diamond industry.

Top post: Joe Bankman: Tax Hero

Steve Blank, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and educator, writes about startups, customer development, and the history of Silicon Valley.

Top post: "Secret" History of Silicon Valley (2008)

Historian Bret Devereaux writes in-depth essays on ancient and medieval history, warfare, and the economies and technologies of past societies.

Top post: War at the Dawn of Civilization

The Long Now Foundation, founded by Stewart Brand and others, promotes long-term thinking and builds a 10,000-year clock.

Top post: Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine

Damn Interesting publishes long-form articles on strange true stories, science, and history, such as the Great Molasses Flood.

Top post: The origin of circuits (2007)

The Internet Archive's official blog, covering the Wayback Machine, digitized books, web preservation policy, and legal disputes.

Top post: The Fight Continues

Groklaw was a site run by Pamela Jones (PJ) that covered legal cases affecting open source, notably SCO v. IBM and Oracle v. Google.

Top post: Forced Exposure

Letters of Note collects and publishes notable letters, memos and correspondence from historical and famous figures.

Top post: Why Explore Space (1970)

An unofficial blog that tracked Google products and features, from Gmail and Reader to Chrome and Picasa, for many years.

Top post: Google Multiple Sign-in Now Available

Works in Progress is a magazine of essays on economic growth, housing, science, and technology, focused on progress and how things get built.

Top post: The housing theory of everything (2021)

Phrack is a long-running hacker e-zine, started in 1985, publishing technical papers on exploitation and security along with hacker culture writing.

Top post: Hacker’s Manifesto (1986)

Raymond Chen, a Microsoft engineer, writes about Windows history, API quirks, compatibility and programming oddities.

Top post: The Old New Thing

Robert X. Cringely, a longtime tech journalist, comments on the IT industry, big companies, H-1B visas and Silicon Valley history.

Top post: What Americans don’t know about H-1B visas could hurt us all

Andrej Karpathy's Stanford pages host his deep learning projects, image captioning work and PhD thesis, plus other Stanford CS material.

Top post: ConvNetJS: Deep Learning in your browser

Jimmy Maher writes long histories of computing and video games, covering the IBM PC, Windows, SimCity and text adventures.

Top post: Sitemap

Darknet Diaries is a podcast by a cybersecurity professional telling true stories of hackers, breaches, and cyber crime.

Top post: Being spied on by the makers of Pegasus, then lured them into a trap

The Public Domain Review is an online journal featuring essays and curated images, books, and films that are in the public domain.

Top post: A 19th-Century Vision of the Year 2000

Online publication on defense and foreign policy, with analysis of military strategy, logistics, and wargaming by practitioners and scholars.

Top post: Feeding the Bear: A Closer Look at Russian Army Logistics

Tedium is a newsletter and site by Ernie Smith about odd technology history, the internet, and everyday objects.

Top post: How I Made Google's "Web" View My Default Search

Amusing Planet publishes short illustrated articles on odd places, engineering feats, historical curiosities, and unusual inventions around the world.

Top post: Sao Paulo: The City with No Outdoor Advertisements

Peter Ehlert's pagetable.com covers 8-bit computing history, with Commodore 64 ROM disassemblies, 6502 details and vintage source code.

Top post: C64 basic and kernal ROM disassembly

Ajaxian was a news blog covering Ajax, JavaScript and web development techniques, active mainly in the mid-2000s to around 2010.

Top post: Intel’s Parallel Extensions for JavaScript

Jason Scott is a digital archivist who writes about preserving old software, BBS files, floppies, and web history through textfiles.com.

Top post: Floppy Disks: It’s Too Late

The Space Review is a weekly online publication of essays and analysis on space policy, history, and spaceflight.

Top post: Helicopter proposed for midair first-stage recovery of the Saturn 5 (2008)

Opera's developer blog covered web standards, browser features, and projects like Opera Unite, IndexedDB, and CSS will-change.

Top post: Decentralized p2p application framework in the browser: Opera Unite (2009)

Tim Harford, an economist and journalist, writes on economics, innovation and decision-making, and hosts the Cautionary Tales podcast.

Top post: Why big companies squander brilliant ideas

Brian Potter writes on construction, manufacturing, housing costs, infrastructure and industrial history.

Top post: A Cycle of Misery: The business of building commercial aircraft

The Library of Congress runs blogs on its collections, archives, maps, photographs, preservation, and topics like federal law and web archiving.

Top post: How Many U.S. Federal Laws Are There? (2013)

Pseudonymous writer who publishes detailed, readable investigations of commercial aviation accidents, covering causes, investigations, and safety lessons.

Top post: The crash of Air France flight 447 (2021)

AI researcher and co-developer of LSTM networks, who writes on the history of deep learning, creativity theory, and credit for ideas.

Top post: Annotated History of Modern AI and Deep Learning (2022)

Kuro5hin is a community-run site where users submitted and discussed technology and culture stories, including programming, health, and travel pieces.

Top post: We Are Morons: a quick look at the Win2k source (2004)

The OS/2 Museum covers the history of OS/2, DOS, Windows, and early PC hardware and software quirks.

Top post: Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?

Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science, writes about nuclear weapons history, secrecy, and policy on his blog Restricted Data.

Top post: The President and the bomb

Jo Freeman, a political scientist and writer, hosts her essays on feminist movements and organizing, including The Tyranny of Structurelessness.

Top post: The Tyranny of Structurelessness (1970)

Ron Garret writes about Lisp, programming languages, physics, and his experience programming NASA's JPL spacecraft software.

Top post: Lisping at JPL (2002)

David Rosenthal, a veteran computer scientist and digital preservation researcher, writes about storage economics, cryptocurrencies, and technology history.

Top post: The death of corporate research labs

Donald Knuth's Stanford page hosts his writings, programs, lecture notes, and announcements on algorithms, TeX, literate programming, and his book series.

Top post: Email (let's drop the hyphen) (2003)

War Is Boring is a Medium publication on military technology, weapons programs, and war history, with David Axe writing on the F-35.

Top post: Fd how the u s and its allies got stuck with the worlds worst new warplane 5c95d45f86a5

Rob Landley, a Linux developer behind Toybox and Aboriginal Linux, writes on embedded Linux, licensing, systemd, and computing history.

Top post: What is Toybox?

Nick Szabo, a computer scientist and legal scholar, writes about digital money, smart contracts, and the history of institutions.

Top post: Money, blockchains, and social scalability

A blog on the history and workings of computing, telecommunications, and surveillance technology, with well-researched long posts.

Top post: The Actual OSI Model

A programmer's blog collecting software folklore, Turing-complete accidents, odd bug stories, and notes on programming languages.

Top post: A collection of things that are Turing-complete by accident (2013)

The Codist is a veteran programmer's blog on software careers, shipping code, 1980s software history, and generative art made with Swift.

Top post: How Many People Does It Take to Ship Software?

Technologizer is a technology history and commentary site that covers the origins of Windows, magazines, Polaroid, early video games and software.

Top post: The Origin of Windows, by the product manager who shipped Windows 1.0 (2010)

Inference Review is a journal of long-form essays on mathematics, physics, science and history, written for an educated general audience.

Top post: Alexander Grothendieck: A Country Known Only by Name

Norbert Landsteiner runs a personal site of retro computing projects, including emulations of the PDP-1, ELIZA, a 6502 reference and old terminal typography.

Top post: Virtual Punch Card Creator

Charles Petzold, author of 'Code' and 'Programming Windows', writes about programming, Windows development and computing history.

Top post: Code: The Language of Computer Hardware and Software

Archive of cypherpunk and digital-money writing, including Nick Szabo's essays, the Bitcoin whitepaper, and the Cyphernomicon.

Top post: Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002)

BLDGBLOG, by Geoff Manaugh, explores architecture, cities, infrastructure, and landscape through speculative and offbeat stories.

Top post: Nakatomi Space

Messy Nessy Chic is a pop-culture blog about history, odd places, vintage design and Parisian curiosities.

Top post: France’s Zone Rouge – A Forbidden No Man’s Land Poisoned by War (2015)

512 Pixels is Stephen Hackett's blog on Apple history, Mac design, macOS wallpapers and Apple news.

Top post: Every default macOS wallpaper

Ian Visits is a London-focused blog by Ian Mansfield covering the Underground, transport projects, and lesser-known places in the city.

Top post: Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground

Futility Closet collects curious facts, historical oddities, puzzles, and math items, and also runs a podcast.

Top post: Images Created from Prime Numbers

David Friedman, an economist and legal scholar, publishes books and papers on anarchism, price theory, and legal systems of other societies.

Top post: The Machinery of Freedom (1989) [pdf]

Markus "Notch" Persson, creator of Minecraft, blogs about the game's origins, development, patents, piracy, and personal matters.

Top post: Virtual Reality is going to change the world

Two-Bit History is a long-form blog on the history of computing ideas, covering Lisp, REST, Simula, and the Semantic Web.

Top post: What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?