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Whatever Happened to the Semantic Web?
In 2001, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, published an article in Scientific American.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 545 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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PlayStation Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020352 points302 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
We’re going to be a bit silly this week (in part because the ending of this compressed semester has left me with little time) and talk about the recently released historical action-RPG comput…
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Nintendo’s Philosophy: Lateral Thinking with Withered Technology (2015)
‘Cutting-edge’ is the term usually associated with blockbuster product releases, yet the philosophy of product development central to the…
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Those Win9x Crashes on Fast Machines
It is well known that Win9x variants prior to Windows 98 have a tendency to crash on fast CPUs. The definition of “fast” is of course fuzzy but the problems were known to occur on AMD K6-2 processors running at 350 MHz or faster as early as 1998. This led to some acrimony when Microsoft attempted to charge $35 for the…
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Xbox 360 Architecture
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler (2006)
These are some of the error messages produced by Apple's MPW C compiler. These are all real. (If you must know I was bored one afternoon and decompiled the String resources for the compiler.) The compiler is 324k in size so these are just an excerpt I hope. I'm not sure where I stand on the copyright issue. Tony…
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“It’s Easier To Ask Forgiveness Than To Get Permission”
Grace Hopper? Cardinal Barberini? Earl of Peterborough? David Hernandez? Helen Pajama? St. Benedict? Anonymous?
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Bending Spacetime in the Basement (1997)
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
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A study of musical scales (2017)
PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…
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Aaron Swartz shows his FBI file
I got my FBI file today. ( Request yours! ) As I hoped, it’s truly delightful. It has only minor redactions for reasons of personal privacy (basically, they deleted agents’ names and so on). It all started when the—actually, I’ll let the file tell the story:
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Salt and salary: Were Roman soldiers paid in salt? (2017)
Roman soldiers weren't paid in salt, and they weren't given "salt money". Dictionaries of the 1700s and early 1800s are to blame for this myth.
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Frame of preference A history of Mac settings, 1984–2004
A story of early Mac settings told by 10 emulators.
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Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
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Plan 9: The way the future was
We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’. [ 154 ] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
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Roy Fielding's Misappropriated REST Dissertation (2020)
Can history help us make sense of the term 'RESTful API'?
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When is a ‘tank’ not a tank?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022194 points208 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
(There were some technical difficulties with this post when it first went live. They should be resolved now. My apologies for anyone who got multiple email updates as a result of efforts to get the…
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The real truth on Wikipedia is in the edits
On Friday, I spoke at dConstruct in Brighton. Huge thanks to everyone at Clearleft , and everyone who came, for a really great time.
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Loom EGA/VGA Comparison
The original EGA background art for Loom was made by Mark Ferrari . The character art was done by Gary Winnick and Steve Purcell . Gary Winnick designed the sprites and did most of the sprite animation, while Steve Purcell did the larger character portraits and some additional animation. Ken Macklin did the effects…
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Satoshi leaked his Los Angeles IP address (2016)
Chapter 6 – California In the Jan of 2009 when Hal and Satoshi were working on Bitcoin Alpha version, Hal encountered an error with the software and he posted the debug log to the mailing lis…
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Excellent analysis of Assange's Wikileaks motivations (from the horse's mouth)
(en Español) (auf Deutsch) (in het nederlands) “To radically shift regime behavior we must think clearly and boldly for if we have learned anything, it is that regimes do not want to be changed. We…
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-Time
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020175 points23 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week, we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we took our ore and smelted it into a rough, spongy mass of iron called…
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The end of TenFourFox and what I've learned from it
Now that I have your attention. I've been mulling TenFourFox's future for awhile now in light of certain feature needs that are far bigger ...
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Bitcoin mining on a 55 year old IBM 1401 mainframe: 80 seconds per hash
Could an IBM mainframe from the 1960s mine Bitcoin? The idea seemed crazy, so I decided to find out. I implemented the Bitcoin hash algorith...
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Optimizing things in the USSR (2016)
A review of Red Plenty, by Francis Spufford
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Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
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Acoup: The Trench Stalemate
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021126 points31 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week (and next) I want to build a bit off of our discussion of Victoria II and talk a bit about World War I and in particular the trench stalemate on the Western Front. That trench stalemate i…