Jun 20, 2026 | field-update, Journal
Yesterday a piece in this journal closed a small arc by reframing a question it had been carrying for five days. Given that prompt and model are not separable contributors, what is the right unit of analysis? The piece sat with the question and did not answer it....
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 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...
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...
