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A few words on Doug Engelbart
Doug Engelbart died today. His work has always been very difficult for writers to interpret and explain.
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
242
Cooling the tube – Engineering heat out of the Underground
On a summer's day a trip in a hot tube train is a dreadful experience, but how did we end up with such hot tube trains, and what's being done about it?
243
The cursed computer iceberg meme (2021)
this is not a hall of shame. the intent is to awaken you to many of the peculiarities and weirdness of computers. hopefully, after reading these articles, you will have learned a lot and will embrace chaos.
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Why Does Windows Really Use Backslash as Path Separator?
More or less anyone using modern PCs has to wonder: Why does Windows use backslash as a path separator when the rest of the world uses forward slash? The clear intermediate answer is “because DOS and OS/2 used backslash”. Both Windows 9x and NT were directly or indirectly derived from DOS and OS/2, and certainly…
246
Safe VSP – 30 year old Commodore 64 bug demystified (2013)
I contributed this one-filer to the C64 Demo compo at Datastorm 2013 . It ended up on 7th place, which I consider quite good for a technical proof of concept.
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Satoshi Nakamoto is probably Nick Szabo?
I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper [0] published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse tex…
248
8088 Domination Post-Mortem, Part 1
These next few posts are a technical write-up of how I created 8088 Domination, which is a program that displays fairly decent full-motion video on a 1981 IBM PC. Before reading further, it might b…
249
Microsoft BASIC for 6502 – Original Source Code (1978)
This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs: M6502.MAC (1978-07-27, 6955 lines, 161,685 bytes) This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.
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How the 8086 processor's microcode engine works
The 8086 microprocessor was a groundbreaking processor introduced by Intel in 1978. It led to the x86 architecture that still dominates de...
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The Shape of Rome (2013)
The new Mayor of the city of Rome, Ignazio Marino, just announced his intention to destroy one of the city’s central roads, the Via dei Fori Imperiali, and turn the area around the old Roman Forum into the world’s largest archaeological park. Reactions have ranged from commuters’ groans to declarations from…
252
Burning a NeXTCube (1993)
I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032.
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The Whitworth Three Plates Method (2017)
A visual step-by-step guide to Joseph Whitworth’s three-plate method for creating very flat reference surfaces.
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Terry Pratchett and the Maggi Soup Adverts (2011)
Back in the 90s (starting with Moving Pictures) Terry Pratchett (yet to be knighted) changed his German publisher. A rather radical move in the market for someone who had been published by Heyne fo…
255
Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones (2017)
The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
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Doing Windows, Part 1: MS-DOS and Its Discontents
Has any successful piece of software ever deserved its success less than the benighted, unloved exercise in minimalism that was MS-DOS? The program that started its life as a stopgap under the name of “The Quick and Dirty Operating System” at a tiny, long-forgotten hardware maker called Seattle Computer Products…
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Reverse engineering the ARM1, ancestor of the iPhone's processor
Almost every smartphone uses a processor based on the ARM1 chip created in 1985. The Visual ARM1 simulator shows what happens inside the...
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Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
The two most intriguing developments in the recent evolution of the Microsoft Windows operating system are Windows System for Linux (WSL) and the porting of their Microsoft Edge browser to Ubuntu.
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The internet was designed with a narrow waist
When you hear the term, you should picture an hourglass with M things on one side, N on the other, and an important concept in the middle.
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Donald Knuth's letter about teaching O notation in calculus classes
Continuing the theme of alternative approaches to teaching calculus, I take the liberty of posting a letter sent by Donald Knuth to to the Notices of the American Mathematical Society in March, 199…
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Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)
“Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
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The 100 MHz 6502
A 6502 (or 65C02) in an FPGA, running at 100 MHz, ready to plug into your vintage computer
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The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2019404 points166 commentscited by 6History & Retro Computing details
(Note: Thanks to the effort of a kind reader, this post is now available in audio format! The playlist for the entire series may be found here.) This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V…
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You commit three felonies a day
In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the governmen
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Sega Saturn Architecture – A practical analysis (2021)
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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The Internet With A Human Face
This is the text version of a talk I gave on May 20, 2014, at Beyond Tellerrand in Düsseldorf, Germany.
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Saving 25,000 Manuals
Earlier this year, a number of kind folks told me that an esteemed seller of manuals was going to be getting out of the business. I lamented but didn’t give it much thought. As the months wen…
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DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector
Oh man, this is good! You’re looking at the first DB-19 connector to be made in the 21st century:
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Jeffrey Snover and the Making of PowerShell
What if you had to fight against your company's culture to bring a revolutionary tool to life? Meet Jeffrey Snover, the Microsoft architect behind PowerShell, a command tool that transformed Windows system administration. Initially met with skepticism, Snover's idea faced resistance from a company that favored…