The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
At the beginning of 1996, Sierra On-Line was still basking in the success of the previous summer’s Phantasmagoria , the best-selling game it had ever published. With revenues of $158.1 million and profits of $16 million in 1995, the company was bigger and richer than it had ever been. In light of all this, absolutely…
How we carried on exploiting sperm whales long after the conventional wisdom said we'd stopped. Forgotten Material #1
A blog about computers, functional languages, Lisp, and Scheme.
One reason I became a historian is the joy of encountering moments in the past that are foreign, yet also oddly familiar.
As it turns out, “thrift shopping” in Japan via the internet can be both very enjoyable as well as very dangerous. In this series of posts, I’ve been examining various optical med…
The demoscene has become a national UNESCO-heritage in Sweden, thanks to an application that Ziphoid and me did last year. This has already happened in several European countries, as part of the international Art of Coding initiative to make the demoscene a global UNESCO heritage. I think this makes
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go bac…
"As for c , that is the speed of light in vacuum, and if you ask why c , the answer is that it is the initial letter of celeritas , the Latin word meaning speed." Isaac Asimov in "C for Celeritas (1959)" [1]
Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over…
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state. (Pt. 1 of 2)
I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand. As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’t remember how I heard about it. It was probably on Reddit or Digg. Once I found it, I started reading…
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a…
Its market cap hit $777 million and Bill Gates' net worth reached $350 million
Maybe putting the designer of the IBM PCjr in charge of this wasn't the best idea
The hunt for the next Microsoft created an era of excess that wasn't sustainable
In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time , I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a…
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Othe…
History of the evolution of my C compiler and operating system for transputer when I was age 16.
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn's history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link…
GeoCities, known throughout most of 1995 as Beverly Hills Internet, is one of the first commercial internet services to make it easy for people to publish a home page on the World Wide Web.
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere. Initially …
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
A year ago I tried using an M1 iMac for work duty but its 21" screen took up too much room on my desk. After seeing Sean's video on Action Retro about putting an M4 Mac Mini inside an iMac G4 , I thought I'd give it a try.
