Striae Origins, Episode 1: From the Command Line

Stephen's Ledger Podcast

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Striae Origins, Episode 1: From the Command Line

Stephen J. Lu

Apr 03, 2026

Episode Summary

In the debut episode of Striae Origins, Stephen Lu traces the programming journey that laid the technical foundation for Striae, an open-source forensic annotation platform for firearms examiners. Before the crime lab, before the casework, before the courtroom -- there was a blinking cursor on a black screen.

This episode walks through the languages, platforms, and hands-on experiences that shaped how Stephen thinks about software: from managing conventional memory in MS-DOS and writing a chatbot in BASIC, to designing a horse racing game on a TI-85 graphing calculator, learning C++ and hand-coding HTML in high school, building a Star Trek fan page on GeoCities, studying JavaScript in college, and modernizing the website for the California Association of Criminalists. Along the way, the episode dives into the histories of each technology -- who created them, why, and what made them matter.

Topics Covered

MS-DOS and Memory Management -- The 640K barrier, CONFIG.SYS, AUTOEXEC.BAT, HIMEM.SYS, EMM386.EXE, and the art of freeing conventional memory

BASIC -- Kemeny and Kurtz at Dartmouth (1964), the microcomputer revolution, building a chatbot with INPUT and IF...THEN

Turbo Pascal -- Anders Hejlsberg’s $49.95 revolution, one-pass compilation, and the through-line from Turbo Pascal to Delphi to C# to TypeScript

TI-85 Calculator Programming -- Zilog Z80 at 6 MHz, TI-BASIC, pseudorandom number generation, the horse racing game with heuristic weighting, and the ZShell assembly hack

C++ -- Bjarne Stroustrup’s “C with Classes” at Bell Labs (1979), object-oriented design, the zero-overhead principle

HTML -- Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (1989-1990), the first 18 tags, hand-coding in Notepad, building University High School’s first website

Networking -- Installing NICs, terminating Cat5 cables to T568B, 10BASE-T star topology, the physical layer

GeoCities -- The neighborhoods, Star Trek starship specifications, and the personal web era

JavaScript -- Brendan Eich’s ten-day prototype at Netscape (1995), from “glue language” to the dominant language of the web

The CAC -- Modernizing the California Association of Criminalists’ website and bridging forensics with web development

People Mentioned

Tim Paterson -- Author of 86-DOS, the precursor to MS-DOS

John G. Kemeny & Thomas E. Kurtz -- Creators of BASIC at Dartmouth College (1964)

Anders Hejlsberg -- Creator of Turbo Pascal, architect of Delphi, designer of C# and TypeScript

Niklaus Wirth -- Designer of the Pascal language

Bjarne Stroustrup -- Creator of C++ at AT&T Bell Labs

Tim Berners-Lee -- Inventor of the World Wide Web, creator of HTML, HTTP, and URLs at CERN

Marc Andreessen -- Proposed the tag during Mosaic browser development (1993)

David Bohnett & John Rezner -- Founders of GeoCities (originally Beverly Hills Internet, 1994)

Brendan Eich -- Creator of JavaScript at Netscape Communications (1995)

Dan Eble -- Author of ZShell, the first assembly shell for the TI-85 (1994)

Mr. Madden -- Computer science teacher at University High School, Tucson

Key Dates

1964 - BASIC created at Dartmouth College
1979 - Bjarne Stroustrup begins “C with Classes” at Bell Labs
1981 - Microsoft licenses MS-DOS to IBM for the original IBM PC
1983 - Borland releases Turbo Pascal for $49.95; “C with Classes” renamed C++
1989 - Tim Berners-Lee proposes the World Wide Web at CERN
1990 - First web page goes live at info.cern.ch; IEEE 802.3i (10BASE-T) published
1992 - Texas Instruments releases the TI-85 graphing calculator
1994 - GeoCities founded; ZShell released for the TI-85
1995 - Brendan Eich creates JavaScript at Netscape; HTML 2.0 ratified
1998 - C++ formally standardized (ISO/IEC 14882, C++98)
2009 - Yahoo shuts down GeoCities U.S.

About the Host

Stephen J. Lu is a retired crime scene investigator and forensic firearms examiner with seventeen years of experience in forensic science, including forensic biology, firearms analysis, and crime scene reconstruction. He has testified as an expert witness in state courts in Arizona and California and in U.S. federal court. After retiring from active casework, he earned an Executive MBA and shifted his focus to leadership development, writing, and web development. He is the author of CSI to CEO: What the Dead Can Teach Us About Life and Leadership and the founder and developer of Striae.

About Striae

Striae is a cloud-native, open-source forensic annotation platform purpose-built for firearms examiners to document, annotate, and review comparison microscope images. Built with TypeScript, React, and Remix on Cloudflare’s edge infrastructure, it streamlines labeling, note-taking, and report generation for forensic casework. Striae is licensed under Apache 2.0.