Lines of code longer than 80 characters drive me crazy. I appreciate that this is pedantic. I’ve seen people on the internet make good arguments for why the 80-character limit ought to be respected even on our modern Retina-display screens, but those arguments hardly justify the visceral hatred I feel for even that one protruding 81st character.

There was once a golden era in which it was basically impossible to go over the 80-character limit. The 80-character limit was a physical reality, because there was no 81st column for an 81st character to fit in. Any programmers attempting to name a function something horrendously long and awful would discover, in a moment of delicious, slow-dawning horror, that there literally isn’t room for their whole declaration.

The miraculous thing about Tim Berners-Lee is that he was the perfect person for the job.

In 1989, when Berners-Lee first proposed the idea that would become the World Wide Web, exciting things were happening in the realm of computing. A new set of standards called TCP/IP were allowing previously isolated computer networks to talk to each other. These standards had become popular, particularly in the American scientific community. By 1989, TCP/IP was also just starting to be adopted by commercial service providers like CompuServe.

In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published an article in Scientific American. Berners-Lee, along with two other researchers, Ora Lassila and James Hendler, wanted to give the world a preview of the revolutionary new changes they saw coming to the web. Since its introduction only a decade before, the web had fast become the world’s best means for sharing documents with other people. Now, the authors promised, the web would evolve to encompass not just documents but every kind of data one could imagine.

It’s hard to believe today, but the relational database was once the cool new kid on the block. In 2017, the relational model competes with all sorts of cutting-edge NoSQL technologies that make relational database systems seem old-fashioned and boring. Yet, 50 years ago, none of the dominant database systems were relational. Nobody had thought to structure their data that way. When the relational model did come along, it was a radical new idea that revolutionized the database world and spawned a multi-billion dollar industry.

The Altair 8800 was a build-it-yourself home computer kit released in 1975. The Altair was basically the first personal computer, though it predated the advent of that term by several years. It is Adam (or Eve) to every Dell, HP, or Macbook out there.

Ruby has always been one of my favorite languages, though I’ve sometimes found it hard to express why that is. The best I’ve been able to do is this musical analogy: Whereas Python feels to me like punk rock—it’s simple, predictable, but rigid—Ruby feels like jazz. Ruby gives programmers a radical freedom to express themselves, though that comes at the cost of added complexity and can lead to programmers writing programs that don’t make immediate sense to other people.

In 1962, JFK challenged Americans to send a man to the moon by the end of the decade, inspiring a heroic engineering effort that culminated in Neil Armstrong’s first steps on the lunar surface. Many of the fruits of this engineering effort were highly visible and sexy—there were new spacecraft, new spacesuits, and moon buggies. But the Apollo Program was so staggeringly complex that new technologies had to be invented even to do the mundane things. One of these technologies was IBM’s Information Management System (IMS).

I’ve always found man pages fascinating. Formatted as strangely as they are and accessible primarily through the terminal, they have always felt to me like relics of an ancient past. Some man pages probably are ancient: I’d love to know how many times the man page for cat or say tee has been revised since the early days of Unix, but I’m willing to bet it’s not many. Man pages are mysterious—it’s not obvious where they come from, where they live on your computer, or what kind of file they might be stored in—and yet it’s hard to believe that something so fundamental and so obviously governed by rigid conventions could remain so inscrutable. Where did the man page conventions come from? Where are they codified? If I wanted to write my own man page, where would I even begin?