History

This started as a question applied historians ask routinely: can we find lessons from history that inform current practice? The specific case was commercial telegraphy and LLM agents — two systems that compress language for expensive, noisy channels. I went through a lot of telegraph techniques and operations asking what might be useful when working with LLMs. Almost everything survived — delimiters, confirmation, priority tiers, compression, validation, observability, access control — but as information management fundamentals, not telegraph-specific insights. They entered the general toolkit long ago. (Some comparisons are in the appendix.) ...

In 1965, Christopher Strachey changed his mind about machine code. He was building the General Purpose Macrogenerator — the GPM — at Cambridge to help write a compiler for the Combined Programming Language (a C precursor). The original plan was simple: mix machine code with macro calls where convenient. The GPM was designed to make this possible. He ended up abandoning the mix entirely. For the CPL compiler, all machine code would be incorporated as macro calls — even sections called only once, where defining a macro added no economy at all. It had started as a way to save effort. It became a principle. ...

Donald Davies helped establish packet in computer networking in the 1960s. He recalled choosing the word after consulting Steve Whelan, a linguist on their machine translation project, “at least partly because of its ease of translation.” But the term appears in computing earlier. At the National Physical Laboratory (NPL), Davies worked alongside Alan Turing. Turing used packet to describe a discrete data structure in Computing Machinery and Intelligence (Mind 59/236, 1950): ...