1981
“That Deep Romantic Chasm”: Libertarianism and the Computer Culture (1999)
"THAT DEEP ROMANTIC CHASM": LIBERTARIANISM, NEOLIBERALISM, AND THE COMPUTER CULTURE
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
1982
Instant stone (just add water) (2018)
If cement weren't 10,000 years old, it would seem like a futuristic technology: liquid rock!
1983
TROS: IBM mainframes stored microcode in transformers
I recently came across a Transformer Read-Only Storage (TROS) module that stored microcode in an IBM System/360 mainframe computer. This unu...
1984
The Sad End of Intel Desktop Boards
As previously discussed on this blog, Intel decided to quit the desktop board business in 2013. What has not been discussed is how Intel treated the buyers of the last generation (i.e. 8-series Lynx Point chipsets) of those boards. Since I have now acquired two of those boards, DZ87KLT-75K and DQ87PG, I had an…
1985
When His SR-71 Blackbird Disintegrated, This Pilot Free Fell from Space
During the early days of testing for the legendary SR-71 Blackbird there were some harrowing mishaps, the details of which have rarely come to light. On January 25, 1966, test pilot Bill Weaver and Lockheed flight test reconnaissance and navigation systems specialist Jim Zwayer experienced their plane vanishing around…
1986
1987
IBM, sonic delay lines, and the history of the 80×24 display
What explains the popularity of terminals with 80×24 and 80×25 displays? A recent blog post " 80x25 " motivated me to investigate this. The ...
1988
Indiana Bell moved a functioning building in 1930
In 1930, Indiana Bell, a subsidiary of AT&T, needed a larger building for their headquarter. The problem? The old building needed to stay in operations at all t
1989
Those odd-looking security barriers
You've probably seen these dotted around a few places, what looks like some sort of security barrier, but wondered how such an odd thing could work.
1990
The Windows Update Marathon in a VM: From Windows 1.01 to XP
Was passiert wenn man ein Windows Update durchführt, oder mehrere?.
1991
The Lost Key of QWERTY (2016)
A typography blog about the history of wide sentence spacing, aka "how many spaces after a period between sentences".
1992
Windows XP minimal-requirement experiments (2006)
Wettbewerb um die ultimative Mindestanforderung für Windows XP zu finden.
1993
1994
Homebrew Cray-1A
As part two ( see previous attempt ) of my ongoing series in ‘computational necromancy,’ I’ve spent the last year and a half or so constructing my own 1/10-scale, binary-compatible, cycle-accurate Cray-1. This project falls purely into the “because I can!” category – I was poking around the internet one day looking…
1995
1996
“Rule the Waves”: a game of naval strategy (2016)
"Rule the Waves" is hard to buy, hard to look at, and hard to play. But you should play it anyway, because the actual game is so good it's worth it
1997
Betrayal at Krondor
During the 1960s and 1970s, a new type of game began to appear in increasing numbers on American tabletops: the experiential game . These differed from the purely abstract board and card games of yore in that they purported to simulate a virtual world of sorts which lived behind their surface systems. The paradigm…
1998
The evolution of the web, and a eulogy for XHTML2
In 2009, the W3C cancelled the development of the proposed successor of XHTML, XHTML2.
1999
“May You Live in Interesting Times”
Chinese Curse? Austen Chamberlain? Frederic R. Coudert? Joseph Chamberlain? Diplomatic Staff? Albert Camus? Arthur C. Clarke? Robert F. Kennedy? Hillary Rodham Clinton?
2000
80x25
Every now and then, my brain clamps on to obscure trivia like this. It takes so much time. “Because the paper beds of banknote presses in 1860 were 14.5 inches by 16.5 inches, a movie industry cartel set a standard for theater projectors based on silent film, and two kilobytes is two kilobytes” is as far back as I…
2001
Assange in Court
UPDATE I have received scores of requests to republish and/or translate this article. It is absolutely free to use and reproduce and I should be delighted if everybody does; the world should know what is being done to Julian. So far, over 200,000 people have read it on this blogsite alone and it has already […]
2002
The Acid Farmers
How Sandoz Pharmaceuticals produced the LSD that turned on the world
2003
Apple of 2019 is the Linux of 2000
Last week the laptop I use for macOS development said that there is an XCode update available. I tried to install it but it said that there ...
2004
Lego logic gates and mechanical computing
randomwraith.com - LEGO, Beer & pastimes
2005
2006
The PDP-7 Where Unix Began
Serial Number of First Unix System In preparation for a talk on Seventh Edition Unix this fall, I stumbled upon a service list from DEC fo...
2007
Ken Thompson's Unix Password
Somewhere around 2014 I found an /etc/passwd file in some dumps of the BSD 3 source tree, containing passwords of all the old timers such as Dennis Ritchie, Ken Thompson, Brian W. Kernighan, Steve Bourne and Bill Joy.
2008
2009
The Founding of Google Maps (2015)
How four partners took an idea from a whiteboard to the browser
2010
Deep Learning: Our Miraculous Year 1990-1991
Many of the basic ideas behind the Deep Learning Revolution were published three decades ago within fewer than 12 months in our "Annus Mirabilis" 1990-91