Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 545 posts.
Recently I realised that, as part of his 8086 reverse-engineering series, Ken Shirriff had posted online a high resolution photograph of the 8086 die with the metal layer removed . This was something I have been looking for for some time, in order to extract and disassemble the 8086 microcode. I had previously found…
When Windows NT was first being developed, one of the goals was to make the kernel separate from the programming interface. NT was originally intended to be the successor to OS/2 but Microsoft also…
This is the story of one computer professional's explorations in the world of postmodern literary criticism. I'm a working software engineer, not a student nor an academic nor a person with any real background in the humanities. Consequently, I've approached the whole subject with a somewhat different frame of mind…
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
My fourth book.
How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.
The German school of Lisp is described by Kazimir Majorinc as a Spartan movement 1 in Lisp implementation. But let me be clear, the Lisps in question are not toys like the one’s littering the Lisp landscape (including my own ). Likewise, these Lisps are not libraries nor are they full-blown development ecosystems.
A notorious ‘second-system effect‘ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’; sometimes, after the…
One of the problems with modern computer technology: programmers don’t learn from the great masters. There is such a thing as a Beethoven or Mozart of software design. Modern programmers seem…
I’ve been pondering this subject for a while, and I think I’m finally ready to write about it. Tcl was, for many years, my go-to language of choice. It’s still near and dear to me…
A food history blog, focusing mainly on early medieval food and French bread history, written by Jim Chevallier (visit chezjim.com for more). .
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020121 points103 commentscited by 6History & Retro Computing details
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the first part of a three four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki, the fictional horse-borne nomads of …
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?
What with the arrival of the category-defining Commodore VIC-20 and the dramatic growth of the British PC market, 1981 has provided us with no shortage of new machines and other technical developments to talk about. Yet I’ve saved the biggest event of all for last: the introduction of the IBM PC, the debut of an…
This interview underlies an abbreviated version to appear in the March 1998 issue of IEEE Computer .
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?
I have gotten a significant amount of response on the Quake 2 extension mechanism. I do read everything that comes my way (I can't respond to all of it, though), and I have learned a few things from the mail.
Some folks have asked me what I know about Phil Katz. It occurs to me that most folks have probably never heard the story, and of the ones who have heard of it, few would know or remember the details. So here's what I know about Phil Katz, plus a little history to put it in context. The dates could be off a bit. I…
In the first Terminator movie, the audience sees the world from the T-800’s view several times. It is well-known that in two instances, there is 6502 assembly code on the T-800’s HUD, and many sites have analyzed the contents: It’s Apple-II code taken from Nibble Magazine. Here are HD versions of…
I understand the classic UNIX Magic poster by Gary Overacre was distributed at past USENIX conferences, and I’ve known of it for years but now in confinement, I’ve decided I want one to hang in my ...
If you are a Mac user, or if you have transferred files from Mac to Windows, you’re probably familiar with .DS_Store files. But where does this name come from?
The Commodordion is an 8-bit accordion primarily made of C64s, floppy disks, and gaffer tape.
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022429 points605 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week, I want to break from our usual format and respond to the fairly unusual global events. I expect a lot of my readers are trying to get a grasp on what is happening right now in Ukraine an…
We normally think of git merges as having two parent commits. For example, the most recent Linux kernel merge as I write this is commit 2c5d955, which is part of the run-up to release 4.10-rc6. It has two parents:
