Historical Source Code That Every Developer Should See

These historical codebases built the foundation of today’s computer technology

Photo by Federica Galli on Unsplash, edited with Canva

Like any other field, computer technology has an impressive, progressive history. Today, we use high-end computers, high-quality modern GUIs, human-friendly programming languages, and real-time futuristic web apps, thanks to the hard work done by past programmers. Learning history makes us happy— it’s so interesting to see the progressive growth in innovations with time. For example, think about the hard work behind a modern airplane — how past people evolved the idea of flying from an Ornithopter into a flying machine — an airplane. Similarly, computers got converted from room-sized expensive machinery into modern (relatively) low-cost general-purpose devices.

I often browse public source codes available on the internet during my free time. Some codebases contain source codes of modern popular computer software modules. Meanwhile, I found some impressive historical codebases that are no longer maintained as usable projects but exist to preserve for the next generations as historical computer science objects.

In this story, I will explain several historical source codes that helped the entire computer technology to progress. We can inspect these source codes, study, and see how each project influenced the modern computer ecosystem and made our lives better!

The World Wide Web (WWW) demo source code

The WWW project offers a way to share information via network protocols like HTTP. In 1989, Tim Berners-Lee demonstrated the first working WWW version with a brand-new web browser and a server. Tim wrote the first web browser, Nexus in C and Objective-C using the C standard library and the AppKit GUI library in NeXTSTEP OS. You can find the Nexus browser source code from this GitHub repository. Look at the first implementation of an HTML parser:

The Nexus web browser’s parser handles an HTML anchor (See source), a screenshot by the author.

Now we have many fully-featured HTTP web server implementations — you can even build your own HTTP server with a preferred programming language…