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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.

History & Retro Computing
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wheel of reincarnation

[coined in a paper by T.H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland On the Design of Display Processors , Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evolves toward…

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The Web’s the Place

I’ve been following some discussions about the future of software applications, and a phrase that came up in my dinner with Robb Beal has been echoing in my mind. What it comes down to is this: if you want to develop software, you can build for the Web and/or Unix and/or OSS platforms; or alternatively, you can be a…

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the Lemacs/FSFmacs schism

In 1991, I was working at Lucid Inc., and our newest product, Energize, was an integrated development environment for C and C++ on Unix. The design of this development environment involved very tight integration between the various tools: compilers, linkers, debuggers, graphers, and editors. So of course we needed a…

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Halloween Document 8

In the last week of October 1998, a confidential Microsoft memorandum on Redmond's strategy against Linux and Open Source software was leaked to me by a source who shall remain nameless. I annotated this memorandum with explanation and commentary over Halloween Weekend and released it to the national press. Microsoft…

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hacker

1. A person who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum necessary. RFC1392, the Internet Users' Glossary , usefully amplifies this as: A person who delights in having an intimate understanding of the…