Cir­cu­lat­ing the nerd-o-sphere at the moment: A Brief, Incom­plete and Mostly Wrong His­tory of Pro­gram­ming Lan­guages.

This stuff is pure gold. Some examples:

1940s — Var­i­ous “com­put­ers” are “pro­grammed” using direct wiring and switches. Engi­neers do this in order to avoid the tabs vs spaces debate.

…

1964 — John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz cre­ate BASIC, an unstruc­tured pro­gram­ming lan­guage for non-computer scientists.

1965 — Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

…

1995 — At a neigh­bor­hood Ital­ian restau­rant Ras­mus Ler­dorf real­izes that his plate of spaghetti is an excel­lent model for under­stand­ing both the World Wide Web and that web appli­ca­tions should mimic their medium. On the back of his nap­kin he designs Pro­gram­ma­ble Hyper­linked Pasta (PHP). PHP doc­u­men­ta­tion remains on that nap­kin to this day.

It’s great, how­ever the lan­guages we love and hate (CFML and ASP, in case you weren’t pay­ing atten­tion) are not included. I think we should come up with some­thing in that style. Can some­one think up some entries for these two? Leave a comment!