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How Intel Missed the iPhone: The XScale Era
Challenging the conventional narrative on Intel's smartphone miss
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Eating the Birds of America: Audubon's Culinary Reviews of America's Birds
On June 26, 1826, John James Audubon sat aboard the cotton schooner Delos off of Florida’s Gulf coast, en route from New Orleans to Liverpool, where he was hoping to find a publisher for his extensive portfolio of paintings of American birds.[1] On this particular day, the winds were still, leaving Audubon’s boat to…
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Ethernet History Deepdive – Why Do We Have Different Frame Types?
In my previous post Encapsulation of PDUs On Trunk Ports , I showed what happens to PDUs when you change the configuration of a trunk. You may have noticed that there are typically three different types of Ethernet encapsulations that we see:
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How to build a 50k ton forging press
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, a revolution took place in American military aircraft design.
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The guidance system and computer of the Minuteman III nuclear missile
The Minuteman missile was introduced in 1962 as a key part of America's nuclear deterrent. The Minuteman III missile is currently the only U...
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The Dying Computer Museum
One can choose to focus on the car crash, or the lessons learned from the car crash. Let’s do a little of both. The proposition of the Living Computer Museum was initially simple, and rather …
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When Serial Isn't RS-232, Geocaching with the Garmin GPS 95
Connecting a Garmin GPS 95 to a Flipper Zero, the serial adventures along the way, and finding the Netherland's first Geocache.
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Getting back into C programming for CP/M
This article is about how programming for CP/M, usng a 40-year-old C compiler, differs from modern C development, even for console applications.
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The Apple IIGS Megahertz Myth
I love the Apple IIGS. It’s a great computer, but could it have been greater? The legend goes that Apple purposefully underclocked its CPU during development to avoid competing with the Macintosh. But is this actually true? Join me for a deep dive into the IIGS architecture, the life the 65816 CPU,
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Abel, the Mozart of Mathematics
“Although Abel shared with many mathematicians a complete lack of musical talent, I will not sound absurd if I compare his kind of productivity and his personality with Mozart’s.” — Felix Klein
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Yesterday's Pixels, Today
In August I finished work on a game called Restricted Airspace for the Wonderbundle, a bundle of new games by NYC game designers available as a reward to backers of the Wonderville Kickstarter . It is a 3rd person aerial shooter in the style of the original Star Fox set in a city modeled on Beirut in the 1890s. It was…
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The Blue Collar Jobs of Philip Glass
I praise his work as a composer—but also as plumber, taxi driver, steel mill worker, and in other trades
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0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE (2003)
Tuesday, January 28, 2003 0xCAFEBABE & 0xFEEDFACE Recently, the origin of the magic numbers of 0xCAFEBABE and 0xFEEDFACE came up in an email conversation between a number of ex-NeXT folks. Specifically, someone asked what the origin of the two magic numbers were in the context of mach-o file formats and why had Java…
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Stapler: I remade a 32 year old classic Macintosh app
The latest version of this app is now available as a free download on the Mac App Store.More info on my apps website at: gingerbeardman.com/apps/stapler/
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The Third Atomic Bomb
After the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US Army Air Force had plans to drop a third bomb on August 19, 1945—with more to come if necessary. Fat Man bomb casing at the USAF Museum
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VisiCalc – The Early Days (2003)
Peter Jennings early history of VisiCalc
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Andy Warhol's lost Amiga art found
August 6 is Andy Warhol's birthday, so let's look back at his pioneering digital art
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Mysteries of the Griffin iMate and the Apple Extended Keyboard II
A vintage keyboard, a mysterious battery, and some questionable 1990s engineering choices...
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Monetagium – monetary extortion in feudal Europe
An English penny minted by William the Conqueror, who brought monetagium to England. Source: History in Coins The way that a modern mafia pr...
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Reverse engineering the 59-pound printer onboard the Space Shuttle
The Space Shuttle contained a bulky printer so the astronauts could receive procedures, mission plans, weather reports, crew activity plans,...
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Was the Internet created to survive a nuclear strike? (2022)
Was the Internet Created for Nuclear War?
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Plan 9 is a uniquely complete operating system
A large contributor to the "feel" of an Operating System comes from the software it chooses to include by default. There are entire linux distributions that differentiate themselves just based on the default configured software. There is room for so many options of base software because there are in general many…
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STS-93: We don’t need any more of those (2014)
It was about a quarter past midnight on July 23, 1999 when the Ralph Roe, the Shuttle Launch Director, told Eileen’s crew that they were go for launch and wished them good luck. The launch, which h…
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Where does the name "algebraic data type" come from?
A blog about functional programming
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Investigating corrupt Winamp skins
I started looking through corrupt Winamp skins and it lead me down some very strange rabbit holes
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The Origin of Emacs in 1976
On the Origin of Emacs in 1976 (Emacs blog articles)
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The Elegance of the ASCII Table
ASCII, a standard whose legacy defines to this day how most of the letters and numbers in your computer get encoded into ones and zeroes, is elegant and beautiful. Via lessons in computer history, punched tape, and typewriters, I'd love to share some of its logic with you.
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A brief history of Dell Unix (2008)
[update December 2021: files for 86Box install at update December 2020: Dell Unix on 86Box “Today let me present Dell Unix more properly, with 1024×768, 256 colors video and proper networking…
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Minuteman missile communications
A programming note: I am looking at making some changes to how I host things like Computers Are Bad and wikimap that are going to involve a lot more recurring expense. For that and other reasons, I want to see if y'all would be willing to throw some money my way. If everyone reading this gave $3 a month, we could…
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1989 Networking: NetWare 386
Thanks to the recent warez mega dump, another long lost gem has come to light: NetWare 386, also known as NetWare 3.0.