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Shelling Out: The Origins of Money (2002)
By Nick Szabo, 2002
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 15 posts.
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The Linux Backdoor Attempt of 2003 (2013)
Josh wrote recently about a serious security bug that appeared in Debian Linux back in 2006, and whether it was really a backdoor inserted by the NSA. (He concluded that it probably was not.) Today I want to write about another incident, in 2003, in which someone tried to backdoor the Linux kernel. This one […]
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Flash Animations Live Forever at the Internet Archive
Great news for everyone concerned about the Flash end of life planned for end of 2020: The Internet Archive is now emulating Flash animations, games and toys in our software collection. In the early 1990s, web browsers were incredibly powerful compared to what came before - with simple files written in HTML that could…
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The original source code of Microsoft GW-BASIC from 1983
We are excited to announce the open-sourcing of Microsoft's GW-BASIC on GitHub!
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The CPUs of Spacecraft Computers in Space
Many CPUs have been used in space craft, space stations and other such probes. Such CPUs must be highly reliable, and very durable. The temperatures in space, even with heaters, can vary widely. The radiation that a system is exposed too can be immense. So when designing one of these systems designers don't always use…
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The Smalltalk Zoo
In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Smalltalk-80, the Computer History Museum is proud to announce a collaboration with Dan Ingalls to preserve and host the “Smalltalk Zoo.”
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Discovering Dennis Ritchie’s Lost Dissertation
Until recently, across a half-century perhaps fewer than a dozen people had ever had the opportunity to read Dennis Ritchie’s dissertation—the intellectual and biographical fork-in-the-road separating an academic career in computer science from the one at Bell Labs leading to C and Unix. Why?
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The Anti-Mac User Interface (1996)
We reverse all of the core design principles behind the Macintosh human interface guidelines to arrive at the characteristics of the Internet desktop.
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Looking Back on the Spanish War (1942)
As an independent charity, we rely on the generosity of donors, Friends and Patrons to maintain these free resources. I First of all the physical memories, the sound, the smells and the surfaces of things. It is curious that more vividly than anything that came afterwards in the Spanish war I remember the week of…
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A look back at memory models in 16-bit MS-DOS
Ways of dealing with the fractured address space.
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The GitHub Arctic Code Vault
Our mission is to preserve open source software for future generations by storing your code in an archive built to last a thousand years.
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Fairchild, Fairchildren, and the Family Tree of Silicon Valley (2016)
Through an unprecedented series of technical, business, and cultural innovations, Fairchild Semiconductor Corporation spawned hundreds of ventures that established Silicon Valley as a world center of entrepreneurial activity and technological leadership. Although the firm’s market valuation never exceeded $2.5…