Why Nikola Tesla was the greatest geek who ever lived. Additional notes from the author: If you want to learn more about Tesla, I highly recommend reading Tesla: Man Out of Time Also, this Badass of the week by Ben Thompson is what originally inspired me to write a comic about Tesla.
Ben's also got a book out which is packed full of awesome. There's an old movie from the 80s on Netflix Instant Queue right now about Tesla: The Secret of Nikola Tesla. It's corny and full of bad acting, but it paints a fairly accurate depiction of his life. The drunk history of Tesla is quite awesome, too. History.com has a great article about Edison and how his douchebaggery had a chokehold on American cinema. A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages. 1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry.
Redditers of the time are not impressed due to the lack of tail call recursion, concurrency, or proper capitalization. 1842 - Ada Lovelace writes the first program. She is hampered in her efforts by the minor inconvenience that she doesn't have any actual computers to run her code. Enterprise architects will later relearn her techniques in order to program in UML. 1936 - Alan Turing invents every programming language that will ever be but is shanghaied by British Intelligence to be 007 before he can patent them. 1936 - Alonzo Church also invents every language that will ever be but does it better. 1940s - Various "computers" are "programmed" using direct wiring and switches. 1957 - John Backus and IBM create FORTRAN. 1958 - John McCarthy and Paul Graham invent LISP. 1959 - After losing a bet with L. 1965 - Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964. 1996 - James Gosling invents Java.
Footnotes. The Code of the Geeks v3.12. The Code of the Geeks v3.12 By: Robert A.
Hayden <rhayden@geek.net> The HTML version of the The Geek Code v3.12 has been formatted by Dylan Northrup. Last updated: March 5, 1996 So you think you are a geek, eh? The first step is to admit to yourself your geekiness. How to tell the world you are a geek, you ask? The single best way to announce your geekhood is to add your geek code to your signature file or plan and announce it far and wide. Well, here it is, finally, version 3.x of the World-Famous Geek Code. Rands In Repose: The Nerd Handbook. A nerd needs a project because a nerd builds stuff.
All the time. Those lulls in the conversation over dinner? That’s the nerd working on his project in his head. It’s unlikely that this project is a nerd’s day job because his opinion regarding his job is, “Been there, done that”. We’ll explore the consequences of this seemingly short attention span in a bit, but for now this project is the other big thing your nerd is building and I’ve no idea what is, but you should. At some point, you, the nerd’s companion, were the project. Regarding gender: for this piece, my prototypical nerd is a he as a convenience. Understand your nerd’s relation to the computer. First, a majority of the folks on the planet either have no idea how a computer works or they look at it and think “it’s magic”.
The nerd has based his career, maybe his life, on the computer, and as we’ll see, this intimate relationship has altered his view of the world. Your nerd has control issues. Your nerd loves toys and puzzles.