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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
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
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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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Dick Smith Is the Greatest Private Equity Heist of All Time
Want to know how to turn $10m in to $520m in less than two years? Just ask Anchorage Capital. The private equity group has pulled off one of the great heists of all time
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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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Porsche: The Hedge Fund That Also Made Cars
The story of how Porsche tried and failed miserably at its hostile takeover of Volkswagen.
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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…
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Yale’s 367-year-old water bond still pays interest (2015)
While most of the Beinecke’s holdings are by their nature dead — their original purpose being fulfilled — the water bond still pays annual interest.
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A Tale of Two Pwnies (Part 1)
Just over two months ago, Chrome sponsored the Pwnium browser hacking competition. We had two fantastic submissions , and successfully bloc...
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8086 Microcode Disassembled
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…
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The Sad History of the Microsoft Posix Subsystem (2010)
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…
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How To Deconstruct Almost Anything (1993)
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…
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Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
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When His SR-71 Blackbird Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell from Space
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…
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The Art of Unix Programming
My fourth book.
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The Path to Dijkstra’s Handwriting (2013)
How I used Edsger W. Dijkstra's handwriting as a model to improve mine.
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The Smalltalk Zoo
In commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the release of Smalltalk-80, the Computer History Museum is proud to announce a collaboration with Dan Ingalls to preserve and host the “Smalltalk Zoo.”
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The German School of Lisp (2011)
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.
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Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (2003)
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…
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Why do Windows functions begin with a pointless MOV EDI, EDI instruction? (2011)
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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Ruins of forgotten empires: APL languages
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…
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Unix and Multics (2019)
Story from the development of the Multics operating system. Unix, our famous child.
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Where Tcl and Tk Went Wrong (2010)
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…