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Wesley Wei

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Wesley Wei

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4d ago

GCHQ Invented the Web's Padlock. MIT Patented It. Its Inventor Died Before Britain Admitted It.

Aerial view of GCHQ in Cheltenham

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Wesley Wei

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Oct 23

Your CPU Runs Several Instructions at Once. IBM Fired the Woman Who Showed How in 1968.

She worked under a new name for three decades before a historian's website brought her design back to her

Lynn Conway in July 2006

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Wesley Wei

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Oct 19

Linus Called It a Failure. Two Companies Living in It Sold for $1.1 Billion.

VMware and Cambridge's Xen both ran guest kernels in x86's ignored ring 1, and Amazon built EC2 on one of them.

Rows of server cabinets in a data center under blue network cables

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Programmer’s Career

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Wesley Wei

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20h ago

Every Developer Types sudo. Its Maintainer Since 1994 Needed a Sponsor. AWS Paid for a Rewrite.

For two years the original took in about $63 a month while its Rust rewrite found backers

In

Programmer’s Career

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Wesley Wei

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2d ago

Microsoft Wrote Off $7.5 Billion on Nokia Phones. The Linux Phone Nokia Gave Up Is Still Shipping

Nokia's CEO said MeeGo was finished even if the N9 was a hit, and the engineers who built it took it out the door

A blue Nokia N9

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Programmer’s Career

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Wesley Wei

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6d ago

Gordon Moore Told Morris Chang TSMC Wasn’t a Good Idea. In 2024, TSMC Made Intel’s Lunar Lake Chip

The foundry started on other companies' leftovers with one willing partner. It now books $122 billion a year, and Intel is a customer

Morris Chang in 2021

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Programmer’s Career

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Wesley Wei

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Oct 26

Gene Amdahl Lost IBM’s Fight Over the 8-Bit Byte. Then He Built a $2.5 Billion Business Selling It.

He wanted six bits for System/360 and lost. In 1970 he left IBM and sold System/370-compatible mainframes built on the eight-bit byte

An IBM System/360 mainframe

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IT Chronicles

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Wesley Wei

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Oct 21

Google Paid About $50 Million for a Camera Startup and Microsoft Paid $7.2 Billion for Nokia Phones

One became Android on three billion devices while the other ended in a $7.6 billion write-down

Google Paid About $50 Million for a Camera Startup and Microsoft Paid $7.2 Billion for Nokia Phones

In

Programmer’s Career

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Wesley Wei

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Oct 21

Intel Told Steve Jobs It Was Ready. Twenty Years Later, the Mac Stops Running Intel Apps.

Apple switched chips twice with a translator called Rosetta, and after macOS 27 the second one falls silent for all but a few old games

Steve Jobs and Intel CEO Paul Otellini on stage in 2007

In

Programmer’s Career

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Wesley Wei

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Oct 18

Pocket Sold Readers a ‘Permanent Library.’ Its Paying Customers Got Back a List of Links.

Eleven days before Mozilla announced the closure, its Premium page still sold "a forever home." The export left out the saved text

A wall of wooden library card catalog drawers

Wesley Wei

Wesley Weihe/him

I write about the people behind the infrastructure you already depend on—every number checked against the primary source. WEBSITE: https://programmerscareer.com

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