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Notes from a 1984 trip to Xerox PARC
Someone at work asked about this trip report I wrote long ago. I had not realized it was ever seen outside Bell Labs Research, but I now kno...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Why We Dominate the Earth
Why did Homo sapiens diverge from the rest of the animal kingdom and go on to dominate the earth? Communication? Cooperation? According to best-selling author Yuval Noah Harari, that barely scratches the surface.
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Windows 98 Icons are Great (2015)
In my opinion, the UI design of Windows peaked in the late 1990s. The classic, utilitarian icons from Windows 98 just look amazing.
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A Bridge Too Far: E.W. Dijkstra and Logic
1. Introduction Shortly after the death of E.W. Dijkstra (1930-2002), K.R. Apt wrote an obituary under the title Portrait of a Genius [1]. At the time it seemed to me a bit over the top. Now, with …
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Some Day, You’ll Have a Telephone with a Screen and Be Able To Dial a Book
Question for Quote Investigator: The host of a video on YouTube mentioned a remarkably prescient quotation from a New York book dealer in the 1960s who predicted that telephones would have screens, and people would read books on those screens selected from a large electronic library. Would you please explore this…
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The Embroidered Computer
The Embroidered Computer uses historic gold embroidery materials to craft a programmable 8 bit computer.
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A dive into the world of MS-DOS viruses
This post is a textual version of a talk I gave at The 35th Chaos Computer Congress at the end of 2018. You can watch the talk that was recorded by the wonderful C3VOC team below if that’s your preferred medium:
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Happy Birthday, XMPP: 20th Anniversary of Jabber
Explore and join the Movim network
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What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit by a Bus? (2000)
The question on the lips of everyone in the Linux community is, "What if Linus Torvalds (affectionately known to the trade press as 'Linux Torvalds') gets hit by a bus?" Reams of virtual paper have been wasted on idle speculation about the results of what is a fairly simple experiment. We decided it was high time…
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Chinese Crankshafts (2012)
To read an updated on this story please click on this link: Chinese Crankshafts for Corvairs, update 2/17/13. If the pictures on this story are small, try clicking on the F5 key at the top of you…
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Lessons in negotiation from Stalin at Yalta
Why did you sting me? You’ll drown too
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Dostoyevsky's “Dream of a Ridiculous Man” (2014)
“And it is so simple… You will instantly find how to live.”
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Star Control II
In this vaguely disturbing picture of Toys for Bob from 1994, Paul Reiche is at center and Fred Ford to the left. Ken Ford, who joined shortly after Star Control II was completed, is to the right.
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Thoughts on, and pictures of, the original Macintosh User Manual
I recently purchased an original Macintosh User Manual (thanks eBay !). I had seen one at a garage sale, and was struck by how it had to explain a total paradigm shift in interacting with computers. I figured I could learn something about helping make innovation happen.
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The Most Important Software Innovations (2001-2017)
This paper identifies the most important innovations in software, removing hardware advances and products that didn't embody significant new software innovations. Its results may surprise you.
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A Swiss Dress from the 16th Century (2015)
(Urs Graf 1517 Since the whole dress on my woodcut isn’t really visible and doesn’t provide any specific details, I collected woodcuts made by Urs Graf, and sorted them into chronologic…
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Reflections on DOOM's Development
The year of 1993 was a magical one, more so than any other. It was the only time we challenged ourselves as a group to create a game that was as good as anything we could have imagined at the time. We didn’t challenge ourselves like that before DOOM, nor after it. It was the right time to shoot for
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The -a to -z of Command-Line Options (2003)
Unix tradition encourages the use of command-line switches to control programs, so that options can be specified from scripts. This is especially important for programs that function as pipes or filters. Three conventions for how to distinguish command-line options from ordinary arguments exist; the original Unix…
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The price of the Manhattan Project (2013)
Of the $2 billion spent on the Manhattan Project, where did it go, and what does it tell us about how we should talk about the history of the bomb?
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Great Adventure-Game Puzzles
This blog has become, among other things, an examination of good and bad game-design practices down through the years, particularly within the genre of adventure games. I’ve always tried to take the subject seriously, and have even dared to hope that some of these writings might be of practical use to someone — might…
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Controlling the Spice, Part 3: Westwood’s Dune
Louis Castle first became friends with Brett Sperry in 1982, when the two were barely out of high school. Castle was selling Apple computers at the time at a little store in his native Las Vegas, and Sperry asked him to print out a file for him. “I owned a printer, so I invited him over,” remembers Castle, “and he…
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Why did Apple's Copland fail when so many 90s OS succeed, dominate world today
(Adapted from a Quora answer .) OS/2 1.x was a clean-sweep, largely legacy-free OS with only limited backwards compatibility with DOS. OS/2 2.x and later used VMs to do the hard stuff of DOS emulation, because they ran on a chip with hardware-assisted DOS VMs: the 80386s Virtual86 mode.…
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Emulate Mac OS 9 with QEMU
(Updated Dec 11, 2018)