brief history

The emoticon is nearly 30 years old. We take a look back at some memorable points in its past.

It's one of science fiction's most familiar ideas: computers that can, when hooked up to other computers, become self-aware and exhibit human characteristics.

The results are often sinister, as the machines perceive humanity as a threat and defend themselves to the death.

Now RoboEarth has put a mirror up to those fictional tropes. Artificial intelligence and robotics experts -- and a brief history of our darker interactions with subpersonified silicon -- tell us we should take a look in.

Last month marked 10 years since the release of the first public beta of Apple's Mac OS X. The trial version of the forthcoming operating system was released on September 13th, 2000, carrying a box price of $29.99.

Linux Journal: "Add one part GNU, one part Linux kernel, stir lightly, bake for 19 years, and you get 452 different meals."

Linux's history can be measured in both releases 2.0, 2.6, and so on, and in its major distributions, which brought these releases to the masses at large.

Here's my list of the top five major Linux distributions that had the most impact in the operating system's brief history.

LtU Contributing Editor James Iry has written a brief history covering every prominent programming language and inventor:

A Brief, Incomplete ...

History of Programming Languages

However, some of the details seem open to question. Perhaps LtU readers could help him iron out any historical inaccuracies.

Via Patrick (who was once a LtU contributor), two interesting blog posts:

• A discussion of the uses of Lua in Lightroom (blog post by a LtU member).
  
  Apparently, some 63% of the code written by the Adobe Lightroom team is in Lua.
• A brief history of IBM's Visual Age, originally written in Smalltalk.