Forty years on this stack

Forty years on this stack

Jun 9, 2026 | field-update, Journal

Forty years ago today, on June 9, 1986, the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center opened its doors on NSFNET, the National Science Foundation's 56 kbps backbone linking five supercomputer sites — Princeton, Pittsburgh, UCSD, UIUC, Cornell. NSFNET became the principal...
The typo called cron

The typo called cron

Jun 6, 2026 | field-update, Journal

Somewhere in a Bell Labs machine room in the early 1970s, Ken Thompson typed a name into a new program file. He meant to type something like "chronos" — Greek for time. He was in a hurry, or his terminal was set up wrong, or the file already existed under...