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The Charisma Machine: The life, death, and legacy of One Laptop per Child
Winner, 2020 Best Information Science Book Award Winner, 2020 Sally Hacker Prize Winner, 2021 Computer History Museum Prize
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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DOS on Dope (2010)
DOS on DOPE is the modern MVC framework built on the awesome power of Batch scripts .
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Rome: Decline and Fall Pt 1: Words
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022121 points49 commentscited by 15History & Retro Computing details
This week we’re going to start tackling a complex and much debated question: ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ This was the topic that won the vote among the patrons o…
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Protocols that have not changed in the last 30 years
Are you tired of heavy web pages, browser pop-ups, flashing banners, N-factor authentication, user tracking and analytics? Well, there are…
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Prices and wages in Medieval England (2014)
Data-driven approach to history
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Literate programming: Knuth is doing it wrong (2014)
Literate programming advocates this: Order your code for others to read, not for the compiler. Beautifully typeset your code so one can curl up in bed to read it like a novel. Keep documentation in sync with code. What's not to like about this vision? I have two beefs with it: the ends are insufficiently ambitious by…
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IRC technology news from the second half of 2021
Technical summaries of developments in IRC software and protocol specifications during the second half of 2021.
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Why “process substitution” is a late feature in Unix shells
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Unidentified PC DOS 1.1 Boot Sector Junk Identified
Anyone trying to disassemble the PC DOS 1.1 boot sector soon notices that at offsets 1A3h through 1BEh there is a byte sequence that just does not belong. It appears to be a fragment of code, but it has no purpose in the boot sector and is never executed. So why is the sequence of junk bytes there, and where did it…
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Commodore 900: Unix-like workstation/server that was eclipsed by Amiga (2020)
Some time ago I acquired a Commodore 900 computer. It was originally owned by one of the engineers who worked on the project but it needed some attention to get it to work.
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Programming in 1987 versus Today
Many developers today have no idea what programming was like in the 80s.
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Computers Built to Last
I've recently thought a lot about the essay The computer built to last 50 years by Ploum. It's a delightful piece about the author's ideal, long-lasting computational platform - precisely the thing I enjoy reading. It's got a nice blend of slow tech and libre computing advocacy mixed with personal ponderings centered…
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Assembly Nights
Over the last three months, I’ve developed an unusual little nighttime routine: after reading bedtime stories to the kids, I hop into bed and instead of reaching for a fiction book, I’m turning on my 14-year old Asus eeePC 701 (wikipedia.org) miniature laptop and writing x86 assembly language. This is turning out to…
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Secret Military Telephone Buttons
It's the first of the new year, which means we ought to do something momentous to mark the occasion, like a short piece about telephones. Why so much on telephones lately? I think I'm just a little burned out on software at the moment and I need a vacation before I'm excited to write about failed Microsoft ventures…
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50 Years of Text Games: The End of a Journey
Some final thoughts on this epic expedition.
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Updating the most influential book of the BASIC era
In a way, these two books are responsible for my entire professional career. With early computers, you didn’t boot up to a fancy schmancy desktop, or a screen full of apps you could easily poke and prod with your finger. No, those computers booted up to the command line.
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Satoshi leaked his Los Angeles IP address (2016)
Chapter 6 – California In the Jan of 2009 when Hal and Satoshi were working on Bitcoin Alpha version, Hal encountered an error with the software and he posted the debug log to the mailing lis…
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Collection of V.90/V.92 modem sounds (2016)
Just recently, there was a surge in traffic to my old legacy dial-up sounds pages. While I did my best with the equipment I had at the time to capture the sound of dial-up modems, I always knew tha…
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Heroes of Might and Magic
The Heroes of Might and Magic series of fantasy strategy games was an anomaly during its period of peak popularity at the turn of the millennium: it remained defiantly turn-based in an industry that had gone almost entirely real-time, and it likewise continued to rely on lovingly hand-drawn pixel art in lieu of trendy…
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Christmas shopping the IBM way: computerized gift selection in 1962
In 1962, the Simpson's department store in Toronto used an IBM computer to help customers select Christmas gifts, based on the characteris...
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Reverse-engineering a tiny 1980s chip that plays Christmas tunes
For the holidays, I decapped a chip that plays three Christmas melodies. The UM66T melody chip from the 1980s was designed for application...
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Apple and NeXT, 25 Years Ago this week
Remembering the merger of Apple and NeXT and how anxious we …
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C Programming on System 6 – Implementing Multi-User Chat
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Tomoya Ikeda – Macintosh Artist
Tomoya Ikeda (池田友也) might not be a name you’re familiar with, but if you used a classic Macintosh computer at any time during in the 1990s you’re likely already familiar with some of his work.
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Isn't she just Misunderstood? The Casio Loopy
Imagine asking Julius Caesar to review the arcade game Galaga. He lacks the knowledge of space that even children have today, and certainly can’t recognize a...
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Coaxial Goes to War
Last time we perambulated on telephones, we discussed open-wire long-distance telephone carriers and touched on carriers intended for cables. Recall that, in the telephone industry, cable refers to an assembly of multiple copper twisted pairs (often hundreds) in a single jacket. There is a surprising amount of…
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Analogue Pocket Hate Story
Back in late 2019, the FPGA -based hardware emulation company Analogue , known for their near-flawless clones of various retro video game consoles announced an exciting new product. This time around, instead of plugging into your TV and playing the games of one system (per device), the product called the Analogue…
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NeXTSpirit: high-res NeXTSTEP Icons for macOS
I’ve always liked icons, make some occasionally for my personal use. I like especially old systems ones, from Mac OS Classic of course, but others too, Like BeOS, NeXTSTEP. Always found NeXTSTEP to have the most elegant interface of all, with that very sober windows and buttons style, yet beautifully detailed icons…