The old joke that the good thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from is still relevant today as USB 4.0 appears on the horizon. The history of USB standards might soon require its own streamable TV series so that we can take our time and binge watch it all but while it's still possible to see it in a single viewing here's a potted version of it. Enjoy! The archealogical record of USB standards. 1995 - USB 1.0 debuted and could transfer 12 megabits. USB 1

This is such a great picture of a commercial programmer working on her program design back in the day. Her design tools are a pencil and a flowchart template with which to draw a flowchart of the program's logic. When that's done she will re-use her multi-purpose design tool - the pencil - to write the program's source code to implement her flowcharted logic design on printed coding sheet forms. Her coding sheets will then pass to the keypunch department to be keyed onto punc

As this blogger has said elsewhere the history of blockchain databases is probably fated to mirror the history of relational databases. They both started life with dismal transaction rates which in the latter case actually led to the development of dedicated relational database machines. In both technologies the different vendors have done their utmost to prevent interoperability between their products and thus lock customers into their own product. In the relational world de