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The engineer’s engineer: Computer industry luminaries salute Dave Cutler
The technology industry is still young, but its history is already rich with myths and legends.
Most cited
Posts that commenters keep linking to, ranked by how many different people have cited them in Hacker News comments. 701 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
272
Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022225 points62 commentscited by 8History & Retro Computing details
This is the third and final part (I, II, III) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part, we lo…
273
Oberon (2009)
Steven Frank's essay on the current state of the desktop UI 1 reminded me of Oberon, a delightfully insane system I used back when I was studying computer science at ETH Zürich. The first thing you have to understand about Oberon is that it evolved entirely outside of the normal genealogy of user interfaces…
274
A Timeline of CIA Atrocities (1993)
A timeline of CIA atrocities.
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Apple didn't revolutionize power supplies; new transistors did (2012)
The new biography Steve Jobs contains a remarkable claim about the power supply of the Apple II and its designer Rod Holt: [1] Instead o...
277
Is Cobol holding you hostage with Math?
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
278
How recursion got into programming: a comedy of errors
By now it is difficult to imagine that once there was a time when the utility, and even the possibility, of recursion in programming was in doubt. Yet that was true of the programming community aro…
279
When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?
John Maynard Keynes? Paul Samuelson? Winston Churchill? Joan Robinson? Apocryphal?
280
A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100
On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company's shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock…
281
The Story of ISPC: Intel SPMD Program Compiler
Collected together all for your convenience.
282
The KindleBerry Pi
Curious, how’s the refresh rate? Does the e-ink display refresh fast enough to make typing bearable?
283
Umberto Eco's Anti-Library (2015)
How to become an “antischolar” in a culture that treats knowledge as “an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order.”
284
Boeing Flies on 99% Ada
A discussion of how Boeing used Ada in its new 777 jet to run a complete fly-by-wire system that technicians backup and monitor with on-board floppy disks. The Ada Information Clearinghouse is the Ada Resource Association's official Web site on the Ada programming language and on software engineering.
285
The Most Important Software Innovations (2001-2017)
This paper identifies the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. Its results may surprise you.
286
Real-life Tron on an Apple II GS
One of my favorite movies as a kid was Tron , the early 1980's film about a computer programmer who gets “digitized” and sucked into a computer world inhabited by personified computer programs. In the film, the protagonist joins a group of resistant programs in an effort to take down the oppressive Master Control…
287
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .
288
The long strange trip to Java (1996)
I've debated with myself for several years about whether or not to write this down. After so much time has passed, the facts are confused, 20/20 hindsight creeps in, and selective memory plays a role in how fairly I can portray the events. Many reporters have asked me my version of these past few years, several have…
289
The Language Construction Kit (1996, 2012)
Caja de herramientas para construir idiomas (en español; traducido por Renato Montes) O Kit de Construção de Línguas (em português; traduzido por Gustavo Pereira) Il Kit di Costruzione di Linguaggi (in italiano; tradotto per Daniele "MadMage" Calisi) Der Sprachbaukasten (auf Deutsch; übersetzt von Carsten Becker)
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Why Were Early Psychedelicists so Weird?
[Epistemic status: very speculative, asserted with only ~30% confidence. On the other hand, even though psychiatrists don’t really talk about this it’s possible other groups know this a…
292
Experimenting with QUIC
At Google, we're always working to make the web faster. The SPDY protocol , which is now the foundation of the upcoming HTTP 2.0 protocol, i...
293
The Oh My God Particle
The Oh-My-God Particle
294
Development Journal for Price of Persia
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
295
They Used To Last 50 Years
Now refrigerators last 8–10 years, if you are fortunate. How in the world have our appliances regressed so much in the past few decades? I’ve bought and sold refrigerators and freezers from the 1950’s that still work perfectly fine. I’ve come across washers and dryers from the 1960’s and 1970’s that were still working…
296
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…
297
A Matter of Millimeters: The story of Qantas flight 32
How a mistake of less than half a millimeter in a single part nearly brought down the world’s largest passenger aircraft.
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Miscellanea: The War in Iran
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2026608 points963 commentscited by 7History & Retro Computing details
This post is a set of my observations on the current war in Iran and my thoughts on the broader strategic implications. I am not, of course, an expert on the region nor do I have access to any spec…
299
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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Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became "one of the most important advances in the history of modern popular mu...