What happens when institutional power is challenged?
What happens? People die.
This book applies the skills that debug code to debug history. Pattern recognition and root-cause analysis that define high-performance computing tradecraft are skills that apply equally to historical puzzles most people accept at face value. The results are unexpected, occasionally unsettling, and consistently illuminating.
The facts have been hiding in plain sight.
The Day the Internet Died
How do large systems innovate, and how do they fail? Big Tech presents itself as unprecedented and unstoppable. History suggests otherwise.
Three chapters examine moments when technology and infrastructure systems reshaped society, drew institutional response, or collapsed under their own scale. The 1988 Morris Worm revealed how fragile the early internet really was. The author watched the response unfold in real time. The coming antitrust reckoning for Big Tech replays earlier infrastructure battles, with the Department of Justice citing a 1958 railroad case as precedent. And the transcontinental railroad itself demonstrates that antitrust enforcement follows infrastructure, not innovation.
The First Silicon Valley Unicorn Startup
The Department of Justice cited one case when announcing its Big Tech investigation: Northern Pacific Railway v. United States (1958). Why would a famous railroad matter to Silicon Valley?
This narrative gleefully traces the legal and historical threads connecting railroad tycoons to tech titans. Along the way, we encounter the first Silicon Valley "unicorn" (a Mormon merchant in 1848 San Francisco), a famous lawyer who trolled the California Bar Association by writing a novel about trolling them, and the uncomfortable fact that Google and Facebook have hired the Pinkertons, the same agency that killed striking miners at Blair Mountain.
The Secret in Arlington
For nearly fifty years, a secret message lay hidden on a tombstone in Arlington National Cemetery. The grave belonged to William Friedman, founding cryptographer of the NSA, and his wife Elizebeth, who broke Nazi Enigma codes during World War II. In 2017, a cryptographic historian noticed something odd. Some letters had serifs, others did not. The widow had encoded her husband's initials using the same Bacon cipher they'd studied together in 1918.
Three essays explore hidden messages, buried truths, and the challenge of separating fact from carefully crafted fiction: from Elizebeth Friedman's classified wartime work (which J. Edgar Hoover kept secret because he'd claimed credit himself) to Wikipedia's subtle distortion of the military Code of Conduct, to the author's personal ties to accused Salem witches and their defenders.
Safe Havens Then and Now
For thirty-five years, St. Paul, Minnesota operated as an open sanctuary for criminals. Police Chief John O'Connor's "Layover Agreement" welcomed John Dillinger, Ma Barker, and Babyface Nelson, so long as they committed no crimes within city limits.
Three essays explore protected spaces and hidden origins: the Age of Sail terminology we still use without understanding, the parallel between gangster-era protection rackets and modern tech platforms (Google's reCAPTCHA forces users to train AI; Twitter's bot-reporting mechanism may train the platform to deploy bots rather than eliminate them), and why the origin of digital computers remained classified for decades.
Top Secret Ultra
The CRAY-1 supercomputer didn't emerge from nowhere. Its origins trace back to a classified team of World War II code breakers who quietly relocated to a glider factory in St. Paul after the war ended. They invented the first stored-program computer, but the NSA kept it secret for decades.
This section reveals the hidden history connecting wartime cryptography to the supercomputing revolution, from Engineering Research Associates' drafty factory to Seymour Cray's remote laboratory in Chippewa Falls, from the ENIAC patent disputes to the CDC 6600, the world's first supercomputer, built by just 34 engineers. IBM's Thomas Watson Jr. famously demanded to know how his vast organization had been bested by such a small team. Cray's response became legend: "It seems like Mr. Watson has answered his own question."
The Two HPC Tradecraft Series
What is "HPC tradecraft" as I know it? This is high-performance computing (HPC) arising from signals intelligence (code breaking) needs. My particular lineage begins with the "Tunny" code breaking project at Bletchley Park during World War II. That produced such an odd-looking contraption that the "Wrens" operating it named it the Heath Robinson. W. Heath Robinson was a cartoonist known for portraying fantastically complex machines designed to accomplish simple tasks.
Thus the high-performance tradecraft I learned within Cray Research already had a 40-year history. Perhaps because so much was classified Top Secret, we never wrote down *how* we did things. Institutional knowledge was passed from person to person as mentorship, collaboration, and informal apprenticeship.
I created two book series to teach you HPC tradecraft.
If you are interested in learning HPC tradecraft, I invite you to begin with the first book HPC Tradecraft for Computer Scientists: What We Stopped Teaching.
If you enjoy "once you see it, you cannot un-see it" stories based on researching primary sources, you are in the right place. This book is tradecraft practice spanning several centuries, demonstrating the timeless skills independent of any particular technology.
- HPC Tradecraft Apprenticeship, three books, is the institutional tradecraft as I learned and practiced, and still practice. Tradecraft is useless unless replicable. The first book teaches my replication method; the second teaches how we accomplished what we did; the third teaches systems thinking, with close observation and characterization of HPC systems under load, using modern AI as the example. The three books are transmission protocol; HPC design; HPC operations.
- The HPC Tradecraft Master Practitioner, three books, is the author letting loose and having fun, expressing his mastery of HPC tradecraft. High-Stakes Ethics prepares for the insurmountable power imbalance of a new graduate in the amoral corporate environment. Unexpected Histories demonstrates debugging skills applied outside computer science, showing their value and timeless nature. Constraint-Based Design demonstrates 1986 tradecraft directly applies to modern AI transformer design and usage.
