991
Do painters subconsciously paint themselves into their work?
The Renaissance history of automimesis, and a proposal for research
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
992
The 90s Developer Starter Pack
Experiencing Windows 95 Exploration Box Installation Like People In Early 90s.
993
Reverse-engineering the 8086 processor's address and data pin circuits
The Intel 8086 microprocessor (1978) started the x86 architecture that continues to this day. In this blog post, I'm focusing on a small p...
994
When did Alan Partridge first appear on television?
Here’s a question for you. When did Alan Partridge first appear on television? Caveats: a) I specifically mean television. Radio is brilliant, and also outside the scope of this article. b) F…
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Top suspect in 2015 Ashley Madison hack committed suicide in 2014
When the marital infidelity website AshleyMadison.com learned in July 2015 that hackers were threatening to publish data stolen from 37 million users, the company’s then-CEO Noel Biderman was quick to point the finger at an unnamed former contractor. But as a new documentary series on Hulu reveals [ SPOILER ALERT! ]…
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Going Rogue
When a beleaguered Netscape announced in January of 1998 that it would release the source code to its browser for everyone to tinker with and improve upon, the news shook the worlds of technology and business to their foundations. This open-source “revolution,” as even many in the mainstream press took to calling it…
997
Sierra Creative Interpreter – Scripts
Gentlemen... BEHOLD! I Have Decompiled!
998
Dark Waters of Self-Delusion: The crash of Transair flight 810
The full story of the 2021 ditching of a Boeing 737 cargo plane off Honolulu.
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Ericsson to WhatsApp: The Story of Erlang
How a programming language from Sweden powered one of the most valuable startup of the 2010s.
1001
My Meeting with David Bohm
June 29, 2023. Some scientists seek to clarify reality, others to mystify it. Physicist David Bohm seemed driven by both impulses. He is renowned for promoting a sensible (according to experts like Einstein, John Bell and philosopher Tim Maudlin) interpretation of quantum mechanics. But Bohm also a
1002
64bit computing on a budget
With all that Dec Alpha talk , and how hard it is to get hardware, and how seemingly exclusionary it is, I thought I would try to touch on a more available 64bit ‘risc’ platform, for the masses!
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The complex history of the Intel i960 RISC processor
The Intel i960 was a remarkable 32-bit processor of the 1990s with a confusing set of versions. Although it is now mostly forgotten (outs...
1004
Simula – The forgotten programming language
What can it teach us?
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When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do?
John Maynard Keynes? Paul Samuelson? Winston Churchill? Joan Robinson? Apocryphal?
1007
Modern TLS/SSL on 16-bit Windows
Lately, there's been an resurgence of new programs written for retro computers—everything from a Slack client to many Wordle clones, to a Mastodon client. But most of these programs, if they connect to the Internet, require a proxy running on a modern computer to handle the SSL/TLS connection, which almost all APIs…
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Miles Davis: A candid conversation (1962)
Last Modified Sunday, 05-Aug-2018 12:53:53 EDT These pages were made by Justin R. Erenkrantz unless otherwise stated. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License . These pages will look best in an XHTML 1.0 compliant browser.
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The Almost Romance Languages
If you like languages, you’ve probably heard the terms Romance and the Romance family. Although it started life as a name for the language of medieval France, Romance has come to be the umbre…
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How to raise a Roman army: The dilectus
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023139 points37 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week we’re going to take a look at the process by which the Romans raised legions in the Middle Republic (c. 290-100 BC, think the age of Pyrrhus, Hannibal and the various well-known Sci…
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My 24 year old HP Jornada can do things an iPhone still can't do
Published: 15-06-2023 01:30 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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New RAM card, prototype Mac Portable, demo System 7
I guess this is a review of sorts, so here's the review part: you should buy Tech by Androda's new 7MB Macintosh Portable RAM card . On my D...
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The curious death of Oppenheimer’s mistress (2015)
Who killed J. Robert Oppenheimer's Communist lover?
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The Mao-Kissinger Meeting of 1973
The archives of declassified foreign relations documents from the United States, China and other countries can give us some insights. I’ve enjoyed reading some of the documents in Wilson Cent…
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The impact of the ‘long peace’ on modern military capabilities
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2023268 points325 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
Fireside this week! We actually haven’t had one of these in quite a while; we had a gap week in April but the last Fireside looks like it was in March! In any case, here we are and here’…
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The History of VisiCalc (1999-2018)
VisiCalc -- Links to the information from its creators, Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, on this web site
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Programming culture in the late aughts (2022)
How it felt to be computing in the late aughts vs. now.
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Preparing for the Incoming Computer Shopper Tsunami
There’s no way for me to know where your awareness starts with all this, so let’s just start at the beginning. Computer Shopper was a hell of a magazine. I wrote a whole essay about it,…