MacOS by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Nice looking and expensive operating system by Apple. Ciro Santilli believes that:
Ronald Wayne by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Video 1.
The Sad Story of Apple's Third Co-Founder by ColdFusion (2022)
Source.
Steve Jobs by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
Co-founder of Apple.
Is Jobs evil? Is he interesting? Undoubtedly.
Good quotes:
Circa 2020, a bowl fell on it from about 25 cm height and broke the screen. £159.99.
2023-10: unable to connect to Giffgaff. "Network unavailable". Same SIM works in other phones. So annoying. Update APN to match: www.giffgaff.com/help/articles/internet-apn-settings-guide. Went next to a tower and then got signal. So the receiver is much worse than the pixel one. Vibration appears to be broken.
Authy sync worked: 2023.
TODO clear attribution source:
Some people say, "Give the customers what they want." But that's not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they're going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, "If I'd asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!'" People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.
Fujitsu by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
The japanese name literally means:
  • 富士 fushi, from Mount Fuji, which itself has unknown origin
  • 通 tong: telecommunications
They died so completely, Googling "ICL" now has higher hits such as Imperial College London.
Video 1.
Why the UK's IBM Failed by Asianometry (2022)
Source. Main lesson perhaps: don't put national money to fight already established markets. You have to fight for what is coming up next. E.g. that is part of the reason for TSMC's success.
IBM by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
As of the 2020's, a slumbering giant.
But the pre-Internet impact of IBM was insane! Including notably:
IBM System/360 by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This is a family of computers. It was a big success. It appears that this was a big unification project of previous architectures. And it also gave software portability guarantees with future systems, since writing software was starting to become as expensive as the hardware itself.
The P51 is a bit too heavy, and the battery could be better!
IBM 650 by Ciro Santilli 40 Updated 2025-07-16
This was the first major commercial computer hit. Stlil vacuum tube-based.
Video 1.
Learning how to program on the IBM 650 Donald Knuth interview by Web of Stories (2006)
Source. It was decimal!

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 2.
    You can publish local OurBigBook lightweight markup files to either https://OurBigBook.com or as a static website
    .
    Figure 3.
    Visual Studio Code extension installation
    .
    Figure 4.
    Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation
    .
    Figure 5.
    Web editor
    . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
    Video 4.
    OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo
    . Source.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact