1831
The Floggings Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Naval Officer? Voltaire? William Pitt Lennox? Herb Caen? Howard Jacobs? Norman R. Augustine? Anonymous?
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
1832
What if the Trinity test had failed?
If the first nuclear weapons test had been a flop, would the world be better or worse off?
1833
In search of 2.11BSD, as originally released
In Search of 2.11BSD, as released Almost all of the BSD releases have been well preserved. If you want to find 1BSD, or 2BSD or 4.3-TAHOE BS...
1834
SAS Rescue 3 Trapped British Diplomats in Albania
My diplomatic life true revealing stories behind the hype is a story that takes the sheen off the perception of a glamorous and privileged lifestyle.
1835
On the Closing of Living Computers: Museum+Labs
As you might have heard, Living Computers: Museum+Labs has shut down; its doors will remain closed for at least the next twelve to eighteen ...
1836
1837
The History of Usenet and FidoNet
Between roughly 1975 and 1995, access to computers accelerated much more quickly than access to computer networks. First in the United States, and then in other wealthy countries, computers became …
1838
Was Acorn's RISC OS an under-appreciated pearl of OS design?
I was a huge Archimedes fan and still have an A310, an A5000, a RiscPC and a RasPi running RISC OS. But no, I have to disagree. RISC OS was a hastily-done rescue effort after Acorn PARC failed to make ARX work well enough. I helped to arrange this talk by the project lead a few years ago. RISC OS…
1839
Die shrink: How Intel scaled down the 8086 processor
The revolutionary Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month so I've been studying its die. 1 I came across two 8...
1840
Real VT102 Emulation with MAME
As a software developer, I spend a lot of time using the terminal, or more properly, a “terminal emulator”. Tools like iTerm2 , or PuTTY , or GNOME Terminal , or the classic xterm and rxvt are all “terminal emulators”; they take raw text and formatting instructions and interpret them to display pretty text on the…
1841
NeXTSTEP on the HP 712 Part 2: Getting Software
In the last post of this series , I set up NeXTstep on an HP PA-RISC workstation . Today, I’m going to get down to business: configure networking, install system patches, outfit it with developer tools, and install some useful software!
1842
1843
Symbian Won
I was working in the mobile phone industry just as smartphones were taking off. I saw the Palm Pilot rise and fall. I witnessed NEC and Sagem and a host of companies launch smartphones and then disappear. But the greatest tragedy of them all was Nokia and their Symbian Operating System. (Actually, Symbian's ownership…
1844
London tube map made from a working circuit board
Fancy a tube map with a difference? How about one made from a circuit board - with lights that show live train movements?
1845
Wirecard – The “German Enron”, and a personal history
For those who just came back from a 15 year space mission: Wirecard is a German company that according to its website is ” one of the world’s fastest-growing digital platforms for fina…
1846
Neil Armstrong's reply to a Moon landing skeptic
In a letter recently published in a new book, A Reluctant Icon: Letters to Neil Armstrong, a teacher wrote a letter to the first human to set foot on the Moon a
1847
A look at the die of the 8086 processor
The Intel 8086 microprocessor was introduced 42 years ago this month, 1 so I made some high-res die photos of the chip to celebrate. The ...
1848
Feynman Lectures on the Strong Interactions
Available at the arXiv this evening is something quite fascinating. Jim Cline has posted course notes from Feynman’s last course, given in 1987-88 on QCD. There are also some audio files of a…
1849
Stories about the B5000 and people who were there (1979)
OCRed and HTMLed by Ed Thelen from a very poor copy provided by "anonymous" - Click for operational characteristics of the processors for the Burroughs B5000 - 5 MByte .pdf
1850
Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981)
The purpose of the Smalltalk project is to provide computer support for the creative spirit in everyone. Our work flows from a vision that includes a creative individual and the best computing hardware available. We have chosen to concentrate on two principle areas of research: a language of description (programming…
1851
Windows Explorer Through the Years
At a glance comparison of every major Explorer release
1852
Learn to read Middle English
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
1853
Discret 11, the French TV encryption of the 80s
I spent my childhood in France, playing a lot of soccer and watching way too much TV. In the 80s, there were three channels available. Two of them, Antenne 2 and FR3, were state funded and boring while TF1 was privatized and offered plenty of Japanese cartoons. My generation grew up with Captain Tsubasa, Saint Seiya…
1854
1855
The Shareware Scene, Part 4: Doom
The full extent of Wolfenstein 3D ‘s popularity during 1992 and 1993 is difficult to quantify with any precision due to the peculiarities of the shareware distribution model. But the one thing we can say for sure is that it was enormously popular by any standard. Apogee sold roughly 200,000 copies of the paid…
1856
1857
First photo of HS2 tunnel boring machines
HS2 has released the first picture of one the two TBMs that will spend around three years digging the longest and deepest HS2 tunnels – from just inside the M25 to South Heath in Buckinghamshire.
1858
Weirdos in the depression
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
1859
The Rise and Fall of Commercial Smalltalk
Relics Gilad Bracha recently posted an article "Bits of History, Words of Advice" that talks about the incredible influence of Smalltalk but bemoans the fact that: ...today Smalltalk is relegated to a small niche of true believers. Whenever two or more Smalltalkers gather over d
1860
IBM Stretch, the NSA, and MLK
The narrative can change, but we must overcome the disinformation and fear that has overtaken the United States.