Historic Code

Bitcoin code piece. © Satoshi Nakamoto.

Slate polled a group of developers, journalists, scientists and historians on which pieces of code changed history. Among the 36 pieces of code listed by Slate are the greats: the code responsible for the alarm “1202” launched by the lunar module guidance system during the Apollo 11 mission, the HTML hyperlink, PageRank, Bitcoin, Roomba’s guidance system, and even the history’s first “Hello, World!”. But the list also includes the bad, like the deadly bug affecting Boeing’s 737 Max. Indeed, it’s not a list of the smartest, sleekest or most revolutionary code, but rather of history-changing code.

⇨ Slate, “The lines of code that changed everything.”