Sketchpad, by Dr. Ivan Sutherland with comments by Alan Kay

Related to the visual simulations, one of Alan Kay's favorite demos over the years has been to show folks Sketchpad, [this video] partly as a "this is what we were doing in 1962, you are now as far removed from that demo as that demo was removed from the year 1900 -- do you really feel like you've made the analogous/concomitant progress in programming?" ... and one of his points there was that a lot of programming acts as a "pop music" where you are trying to replicate the latest new sounds and marginally iterate on those, rather than study the classics and the greats and the legacy of awesome things that had been done in the past.

For "how things work", I recommend the book Code by Charles Petzold. After that, Jon Stokes's Inside the Machine will give a lot of details on CPU architectures up to Intel's Core 2 Duo. You can also try following along a computer engineering book if you want to go that low in detail with exercises, Digital Fundamentals by Floyd is a common textbook (I have an old 8th edition). History-wise, enjoy learning slowly because there's so much that even if you dedicated yourself to it you wouldn't be "done" any time soon! Some suggestions in order though: Watching The Mother of All Demos : [link] A short clip of Sketchpad presented by Alan Kay: [this video] An article from the 40s that also inspired Engelbart: [link] The Information by James Gleick What the Dormouse Said by John Markoff The Psychology of Computer Programming by Gerald Weinberg Lastly, to mix up in whatever order you please, some paper collections: Object-Oriented Programming: The CLOS Perspective edited by Andreas Paepcke History of Programming Languages papers for various langs you're interested in, here's the set from the second conference in 1993 [link] but there have been further conferences to check out too if it's interesting Also all of the Turing Award winners' lectures I've read have been good [link] All that and some good recommendations others have given should keep you busy for a while!

Reactive Programming[1] (not F RP): Look up ThingLab[2][3]. Done in 1978 on Smalltalk by Alan Borning. Alan Kay typically points to Sutherland's Sketchpad (1963)[4] as inventing objects, computer graphics and constraint programming. I have to admit I don't understand the hype over FRP. I mean it's great that you can now do reactive programing in FP as well, but it's not like this hasn't been around for ages. Anyhow, what Alan does is not co-opting , it is pointing out all the great work that has been forgotten and then reinvented, usually badly, in the hope that someone will finally do a better job than what went before. See also Brett Victor's talk "The Future of Programming"[5]. Brett works for Alan now. Others have pointed out VPRI[6]. Open Source programming languages that came out of there include OMeta (OO pattern matching)[7], Nile (dataflow for graphics)[8], Maru (metacircular S-Expr. eval)[9], KScript (FRP)[10], etc. In terms of publishing papers: he's 73 for pete's sake. He doesn't have to publish papers, or do anything he doesn't absolutely want to. But in fact he doesn't just rest on his awards (Turing...) or patents or having had a hand in creating just about every aspect of what we now consider computing. He's still going strong. So yes, there is a peanut gallery. You just may be confused as to who is sitting in it and who is on stage changing the world. [1] [link] [2] [link] [3] [link] [4] [this video] [5] [link] [6] [link] [7] [link] [8] [link] [9] [link] [10] [LIN