history

Weekly Paper Notes — the Seminal Paper of the Week for the 2026-08-29 digest. Area: Operating Systems. Authors: Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson (Bell Laboratories) Published: Communications of the ACM, Vol. 17, No. 7, July 1974, pp. 365–375. DOI: 10.1145/361011.361061 Why the paper still matters Most influential systems papers describe something large. This one describes something conspicuously small, and the smallness is the argument. The system it presents ran on a PDP-11/45 with 144K bytes of core, of which the resident kernel occupied roughly 42K — about 16K words of code and data....

Andy Pavlo opens CMU’s database systems course with a claim that reframes most of what practitioners argue about online: the problems are not new. The hardware changed; the problems didn’t. This week’s Classic of the Week is his Lecture 1 — course information plus a compressed history of database systems from the 1960s to the present. It’s the single best hour for understanding why databases look the way they do, and it comes with an implicit warning: if you don’t know this history, you will spend your career re-litigating settled debates....

In 2014 at NeurIPS in Montreal, Ilya Sutskever, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le presented “Sequence to Sequence Learning with Neural Networks” — the paper that showed encoder–decoder LSTMs could translate French to English end-to-end and, in doing so, planted the seed of the scaling hypothesis. In December 2024 the paper won the NeurIPS Test of Time Award and Sutskever came back on stage to look at that decade with 10 more years of hindsight....

Jonathan Blow gave this hour-long talk at DevGAMM in 2019, and in the seven years since it has quietly become one of the most-cited critiques of modern software engineering. Blow — the game designer behind Braid and The Witness, and the creator of the Jai programming language — makes a claim most programmers instinctively resist: technological knowledge is not on a monotonic climb. Civilizations lose capabilities all the time. Ours is probably losing them right now, and software is one of the leading indicators....

Every so often the seminal-talk slot lands on something older than every framework it critiques. This one runs a full 27 minutes and it is not a re-enactment: it is the actual 1982 Bell Labs promotional film, with Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Alfred Aho, Stu Feldman, and Lorinda Cherry on camera explaining, in their own voices, why the system they built looks the way it does. The AT&T Archives channel has now cleared it for wide release, so the classic-of-the-week pick this week writes itself....