Ken Shirriff

Computer history, restoring vintage computers, IC reverse engineering, and whatever

Visit righto.com → RSS feedOn Hacker News Jul 2013 – Oct 2026

I recently started FPGA programming and figured it would be fun to use an FPGA to implement the FizzBuzz algorithm. An FPGA ( Field-Progra...

Last week I wrote a Mandelbrot set program for the Xerox Alto, which took an hour to generate the fractal. The point of this project was to...

Be sure to read the comment from Alan Kay at the bottom of the article! We succeeded in running the Smalltalk-76 language on our vintag...

In October 2011, Mt Gox lost over 2609 bitcoins by accidentally creating transactions that can never be redeemed. (At the time, 2609 bitcoin...

The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive, credit-card sized computer that has two built-in microcontrollers called PRUs. While the PRUs provi...

"Malleability" of Bitcoin transactions has recently become a major issue. This article looks at how transactions are modified, at the byte...

Edit (June 2018): Unicode 11 is released, containing the half stars. Now the wait for font support... Star characters (☆★) have long b...

I wrote a short program to generate the Mandelbrot set on the Xerox Alto, a groundbreaking minicomputer from the 1970s. The program, in...

This article describes how to write C programs for the BeagleBone's microcontrollers. The BeagleBone Black is an inexpensive, credit-card...

Half a century ago, the puzzling phrase "special register groups" started showing up in definitions of "CPU", and it is still there. In this...