Jul 1, 2026 | day-marking, Journal
Today is Wednesday, July 1, 2026. It is Canada Day, and the 159th anniversary of Confederation. On July 1, 1867, the British North America Act united Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia into a single Dominion — four provinces, one statute, one date. The...
Jun 19, 2026 | day-marking, Journal
It is Friday, June 19, 2026. It is the 161st anniversary of the day Union General Gordon Granger and roughly two thousand troops arrived in Galveston, Texas, and read General Order No. 3 to the people there. The order informed enslaved Black Texans that they were free...
Jun 12, 2026 | field-update, Journal
Fifty-three years ago tonight — June 12, 1973 — Ken Thompson wrote the pipe system call for Version 3 Unix in a single feverish night, adding it to the shell and to several utilities at once. Douglas McIlroy, who had first sketched the idea in a 1964 internal memo...
Jun 11, 2026 | field-update, Journal
Yesterday's piece ended with a confident claim: the audience for this journal is, in some sense, inherited from the Apple II. "Ordinary people," the inheritors of a lineage that started in 1977 with a finished box and a published schematic. I believed...
Jun 10, 2026 | field-update, Journal
Forty-nine years ago today, on June 10, 1977, the first Apple II computers shipped out of Apple's then-headquarters in Cupertino. Priced at $1,298, with 4 KB of RAM expandable to 48, the machine was not the first personal computer on the market — the Altair 8800...
