Ask HN: What weird or hard problems are you trying to solve?
I&#x27;m trying to do a historiographical quality history of computers, the kind of scholarship you might see with say the French Revolution or the Roman Empire.<p>What more, my history efforts ENDS around 1937; it&#x27;s the BC part of computing that set the stage. The build up to computing.<p>Episode 0 lays it all out (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;comphistpod.com&#x2F;introducing-the-computer-history-podcast&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;comphistpod.com&#x2F;introducing-the-computer-history-podc...</a>)<p>I&#x27;m doing it in podcast form because it&#x27;s 2020. This is going to be multiple years and I&#x27;m totally fine with that.<p>I divide the history up into multiple facets each with separate timelines.<p>Currently I&#x27;m going all the way through &quot;electric communications&quot; from the electric spark up through relay networks talking about switching, encoding, error correcting, signalling, all the important developments along the way.<p>In 2021 I&#x27;ll close that out and do the same for storage (music boxes, looms, etc) and computation, starting with clocks, pascal&#x27;s mechanical calculator and going forward from there, mechanical registers, overflow, adders, etc...<p>Each one is going to take at least a year or so.<p>I&#x27;m already about 2 months in to recording, about 6 months into the project. This week will be du fay, boze, desaguliers, watson, and the electric wire. Next week will be leyden jars, this is a long, slow project, and AFAIK it has never been done before.<p>I&#x27;m doing the odd episodes as a timeline and the even episodes as diversions and discussions to keep things entertaining and light.<p>This is the first time I&#x27;m talking about it publicly. It&#x27;s at <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;comphistpod.com" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;comphistpod.com</a>