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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. 701 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
302
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?
303
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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When George Soros Broke the British Pound (2014)
How George Soros made his fortune on a daring bet against the British pound and the Bank of England.
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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…
308
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.
309
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…
310
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…
311
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...
313
How Breakfast Became a Thing
Do you think breakfast is the most important meal of the day? Then you fell for an ad campaign designed in 1944 to sell more cereal.
314
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…
315
Burning a NeXTCube (1993)
I am writing this memo to explain what happened to the case our NeXTCube Computer, Serial Number AA001032.
316
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…
317
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.
318
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…
319
Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones (2017)
The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
320
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…
321
Admiral Rickover's 'Paper Reactor' Memo (1953)
Rickover's famous speech about the distinction between academic (paper) reactors and practical reactors.
322
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...
323
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.
324
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.
325
A new compression algorithm to make Google Chrome updates small
We have just started using a new compression algorithm called Courgette to make Google Chrome updates small. We have built Google Chrome to ...
326
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…
327
Blink: A rendering engine for the Chromium project
WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful desig...
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Seven years on, what do we know about the disappearance of flight MH370? (2021)
“Good night, Malaysian three seven zero.”
329
Adobe Photoshop Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.
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Adobe Photoshop 1.0.1 Source Code (2013)
When brothers Thomas and John Knoll began designing and writing an image editing program in the late 1980s, they could not have imagined that they would be adding a word to the dictionary.