Legacy Code - A History of computing - Free 360 page book about history of computing

Hi Product Hunt! 👋 I always been fascinated by one thing — most of our modern, high-tech world is basically held together by "Thursday problems." You know, those catastrophic headaches that came from some brilliant solution someone invented on a Tuesday in 1954 or 1972 and nobody questioned it since. I wrote Legacy Code because I wanted to close the gap between the veteran engineer who knows exactly why a terminal is 80 characters wide, and the student who thinks their code behaves like a Victorian steam engine for absolutely no reason. (Spoiler: it usually does have a reason. A very old, very weird reason.) In Volume 1 you'll find stories like: * How a stroke of genius from 1945 gave us both the modern computer and every single buffer overflow in history * Why IBM's System/360 ended up costing more than the Manhattan Project * How Margaret Hamilton basically invented the term "Software Engineering" because Apollo astronauts kept making mistakes Why I'm doing this? I genuinely believe that understanding our "digital masonry" — where it came from, why it's shaped the way it is — makes us all better engineers. Not just better at fixing things, but better at not breaking them in the first place. This is first volume of what I'm planning as 8-part series. And I decided to make it completely free. No paywalls, no newsletter trap, nothing. Just computing history that I think is worth reading. Would love to hear your thoughts! Or your own legacy code horror stories — I know you have them. 😄 Happy reading! 🚀