I’ve been thinking a lot about “technology wars”, of late. Some of this has been driven by my foolings around with Floppy Fridays – thinking about the competition between 8-bit computing platforms, back in the day – but other musings have been prompted by links I’ve been sent in various newsletters. For instance, here’s an article on Quora by Dave Whittle that takes a look at the fascinating history between OS/2 and Windows, and why the latter won the battle for the graphical desktop OS.
In a JavaScript newsletter I received a link to this excellent 3-hour (!) podcast interview by Lex Fridman of Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript. I didn’t expect to listen to it all (admittedly at double-speed, but that’s still a lot of time) but it was completely enthralling. It talks about the history of JavaScript – and other programming languages – as well as the browser wars. Did you know Mozilla was so-named because it was intended to be a “Mosaic killer”? I…