The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
This is annecdata - not a serious academic study. Adjust your expectations accordingly. When I first got online, the World Wide Web was still in its infancy - so CompuServe was my gateway to the Internet. I loved their well organised chat room. A couple of clicks and I could be discussing Babylon 5 with people in…
CIA & Army Counterintelligence involved in secret “processing” of U.S. POWs who confessed to using biological weapons against China, No…
If you have to stare at someone’s bum, it’s far better to look at a nice female bum than a bloke’s bum!
My daughter found my Psion 3a the other day, tucked at the back of a cupboard she was clearing out for me. It looked fine and is still in excellent aesthetic condition, and fortunately I had left n…
Historically, Lisp was a behemoth in the world of language design innovation. The list of Lisp’s innovations is so long that I’d have to list most of the features associated with modern languages. (Do you like if statements? You can thank Lisp!)
The physical data format on a Commodore 1541 5¼-inch floppy disk as used by the C64 is completely defined in software. The drive’s operating system fits 170 KB on a disk. This article explores different strategies, each with its pros and cons, to fit up to 246 KB.
After viewing our CGA Redux livestream a friendly tinkerer named Arek contacted me if I was interested in a homebrew Hercules Graphics Card PCB that he designed. Naturally I said yes and assembled the card, playing beta tester for his design. It will probably be open sourced eventually, but is not yet available. So…
Written and copyrighted by Christian A. Schiller , World of M.U.L.E. curator, with contributions from Andrew Dieffenbach, M.U.L.E. Online developer. No reprint without permission. Happy to get feedback on this feature, either via the contact form or one of the following social media accounts: Facebook , Twitter or…
In this long article, I, being as far as I know the first outside Microsoft to have learnt how the AARD code works, explain that I condemn its form but broadly sympathise with its function.
In medieval England, ale was an alcoholic drink made from grain, water, and fermented with yeast. The difference between medieval ale and beer was that beer also used hops as an ingredient. Virtually everyone drank ale. It provided significant nutrition as well as hydration (and inebriation). The aristocracy could…
For almost two decades, MSKey Readme 1 has heralded the defeat of Windows XP's product activation, not via mere circumvention , but by cracking the encryption algorithm itself.
Let’s see how Gentoo is doing these days. Below is a plot of Gentoo’s rankings on DistroWatch :
A deep dive on the early days of creative computing coming to life. Punch cards, plotters, light pens and lots more.
My dad built something cool but didn't boast about it
I have a laptop. Sometimes I run VMs on it, and some of those VMs run DOS. When a DOS VM does not have any power management, the laptop quickly lets me know by kicking up the fan speed. It is Very Annoying . So annoying that I really want to avoid the situation.
I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86…
Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
This page provides a single entry point to all the posts in the story of how the world got online. Now available as a book, buy here. The Backbone: Introduction One System, Universal Service? The U…
Nowadays vocalists control popular music—but that wasn't always true
It’s 1178 BCE and the sun never sets on the Ugaritic Empire/Kassite Federation/Old Babylonion Empire/Ugaritic trade network! And it’s all thanks to bronze, the hardest and most durable metal to ever come down the pike. Yes, whether you’re looking to smelt or cast, whether you need an ingot or a rhyton, a double-headed…
It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll…
Today, Internet Explorer has been consigned to the dustbin of history, yet its quirks and peculiar features remain an interesting area of discussion from a historical perspective. There was one particular feature of IE which not only now seems comically naive, but also completely impractical: namely, IE tried to…
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
The <keygen/> element is probably one of the weirdest elements ever added to HTML:
I got a bit caught up this month, so I had to delay a couple of things, but I’ll be […]
So who does?
