The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
I have gotten a significant amount of response on the Quake 2 extension mechanism. I do read everything that comes my way (I can't respond to all of it, though), and I have learned a few things from the mail.
Text adventures are weird. They are so weird I don’t know how to write this article, so prepare to read something even more rambly than usual. Normally, when this happens, I decide not to publish the article. But
This year my side project of choice was to create a brand new game for Palm OS, it started out as something that I thought I would finish in a month but ended up taking more than half a year in the end.
Think about it for a second: could the internet exist without standards and protocols? Of course not! Computers need shared rules and agreements to communicate with one another. Even human languages, like English, work much the same way. They function as a kind of communication protocol because we’ve all agreed on…
In 1978, Bricklin and Frankston took out a loan to develop "Calcu-ledger," a tool that could project the fiscal health of taking out that very loan
The following submission to Jeremy Friesen’s ‘elevator pitch’-themed Emacs blog carnival is taken from my rather long manuscript in progress (‘the present work’), tent…
Who invented residual neural networks?
Roughly a year ago, I wrote a text about the effects of CRT screens on pixel art . It surprised me by becoming one of the most controversial pieces I've published here. In it, I propose the following:
Large language models (LLMs) still feel a bit like magic to me. Of course, I understand the general machinery enough to know that they aren’t, but the gap between my outdated knowledge of the field and the state-of-the-art feels especially large right now. Things are moving fast. So six months ago, I decided to close…
Quantum Software and the microkernel UNIX
The rise and fall of yogh
With a map!
Blog posts and articles by author and game developer Jordan Mechner
Better 32-bit performance was worth trading some 64-bit performance to get
For this project I designed and built a meshtastic radio that plugs directly into the Commodore 64. My goal was to release this at the VCF M...
Celebrated Italian author and scholar Umberto Eco (1932-2016) published an article in 1995 entitled Ur-Fascism . Eco grew up during the time of Mussolini. In the article, he jumps from memories of…
The first and most iconic of all the Choose Your Own Adventure books involved spelunking, just as did the first and most iconic of all computer-based adventure games .
Like so many past ephemera finds I’ve shared here, I bought these midcentury North American restaurant placemats at Brimfield Flea this July from a vendor who had around 500 in a big plastic tub. I bought 25 for $75 (a steal!) but I did have to talk myself out of asking how much it would be for the whole box. Most of…
It's one of my periodic downsizing cycles, which means checking the hardware inventory (and, intermittently, discovering things that were no...
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2025334 points192 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the third piece of the fourth part of our series (I, II, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb, IVc, IVd,IVe, V) looking at the lives of pre-modern peasant farmers – a majority of all of the humans who have…
Windows 98 runs surprisingly well in QEMU via UTM SE, but it requires some care in setting it up. It’s a great way to run old 90s Windows and DOS software on your iPad (and Mac too, though you have… Continue reading →
The Manhattan Project, the US program to build an atomic bomb during WWII, is one of the most famous and widely known major government projects: a survey in 1999 ranked the dropping of the atomic bomb as the top news story of the 20th century. Virtually everyone knows that the project built the bombs that were dropped…
I own a Macintosh Plus from 1986, I found it in the mid 2000's on my college campus on a free-to-a-good-home shelf (Mad Marc's shelf in the chemistry building) in great shape and with its mouse, keyboard, and an HD-20 external hard disk drive. That silly computer has been on the journey with me ever since, leaving…
Microsoft tried to own content syndication with ICE. How open RSS beat it, and what that war teaches us about open formats like email.
The demo scene was recently proclaimed a UNESCO Living Cultural Heritage in Sweden, following several other European nations. As a scener, I'm not quite sure how I feel about that. It's amusing on some level, there's maybe even a bit of pride involved, but also fear that it might bring unwanted attention to a Good…
The Sound Blaster
The oldest recorded transaction was in 3100 BC
→日本語で読むWelcome to "Interviews with Demosceners"! This time, we welcome Japanese demoscener 0b5vr, who mainly creates 64K...
TL;DR: I made a website for the original classic Mac patterns I was working on something and thought it would be fun to use one of the classic Mac black-and-white patterns in the project. I'm talking about the original 8×8-pixel ones that were in the...
