I love reading about the early days of computing, but finding the alpha in raw historical archives can be tough. I built f0lkl0r3.dev over the weekend to fix that.

It takes nearly 1,000 oral histories from the Computer History Museum and makes them explorable, searchable, interconnected, and multimodal. To build it, I used the Gemini APIs (via ai.dev) to process the massive volume of unstructured interview text, pulling out the timelines, machines, and people so they could be cross-referenced. The app itself was built with Antigravity, next steps will be to add images and videos.

You can search by specific mainframes, browse by era in the timeline, or just read the Apocrypha section for weird historical anecdotes. Enjoy the rabbit hole! I hope it distracts and inspires at least a few more people than me today. :)