2191
Glowing mercury thyratrons: inside a 1940s Teletype switching power supply
We recently started restoring a Teletype Model 19, a Navy communication system introduced in the 1940s. 14 This Teletype was powered by a b...
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History & Retro Computing
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2192
Learning BASIC Like It's 1983
Imagining a childhood encounter with BASIC on the Commodore 64.
2193
What Was the Microsoft Network?
No, not that one . Or that other one . The letters "MSN" have meant so many things to so many people, a term that's been overloaded with a thousand different meanings. In the same way they throw the words "National Lampoon" onto any random movie to indicate that it claims to be a comedy, they slap the "MSN" label onto…
2194
Programming War Stories: Connectix
Aaron Giles is a Seattle-area programmer, musician, web developer, and graphic designer.
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A study of musical scales (2017)
PREFACE. This essay was written in 2009. Since then, a few errata have been corrected and I embedded the youtube videos, but there have been no substantial additions. I think it still holds up fairly well, but if I were to rewrite it today, I would change some things. My main regret is using the criteria of maximum…
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What Did Ada Lovelace’s Program Actually Do?
In 1843, Ada Lovelace published the first nontrivial program. How did it work?
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Two player Karateka using a 42 byte patch
One of the first games I ever played on my family’s Apple IIe was the Jordan Mechner master work, Karateka . Fight the bad guys, save the princess – it’s a simple but classic formula. My brother and I would take turns making our way through Akuma’s fortress. Even then, we wanted a two player version.
2201
Poland was shockingly liberal during the 1400s
Zet Casino 2026: tysiące gier, bonus powitalny, wpłaty BLIK i krypto, wypłaty w minutach oraz polskie wsparcie 24/7. Sprawdź naszą ofertę.
2202
A Sound Card Before Its Time
A mysterious full-length sound card recently arrived at the OS/2 Museum. It was clearly manufactured by IBM in 1985, and sports a 20 MHz Texas Instrument TMS32010 DSP (the DSP is the large black DIP chip near the lower left corner, not the ceramic gold cap chip).
2203
Inside the die of Intel's 8087 coprocessor chip, root of modern floating point
Looking inside the Intel 8087, an early floating point chip, I noticed an interesting feature on the die: the substrate bias generation circ...
2204
Where Vim Came From
Tracing the long lineage of software that brought us Vim.
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A bootable CD image with a retro game in a single tweet
Previously: security engineer at Square/Block, co-author of HackLang, put the 's' in https at Facebook/Meta. Maker of CTFs.
2207
Thank You, Robert Voit, Creator of Paint Shop Pro
Robert — In the early to mid-90s my hobby was making video games of various sorts with my friend Jesse. Our tools were Recreational Software Designs Game-Maker 2.0 and your creation JASC Paint Shop…
2208
Computer science as a lost art (2015)
An old friend of mine asked me this in email last night...
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Is Cobol holding you hostage with Math?
Face it: nobody likes fractions, not even computers.
2211
The mysterious heart of the Roland TR-808 drum machine
The strange story of a rejected batch of transistors at the heart of the world's most iconic drum machine - The Roland TR-808.
2212
An ingenious vintage German cycle map (2014)
We cycled the Swiss part of the Rhine Cycleway last week, with our folding bikes neatly stowed in suitcases for the flight. A combination of cycle.travel (natch), the Cicerone guide, and the excellent MapOut app guided us safely along the way: a very modern combination of mapping styles.
2213
Doing Windows, Part 5: A Second Try
The beginning of serious work on the operating system that would come to be known as OS/2 left Microsoft’s team of Windows developers on decidedly uncertain ground. As OS/2 ramped up, Windows ramped down in proportion, until by the middle of 1986 Tandy Trower had just a few programmers remaining on his team. What had…
2214
J.C. Bose: 60 GHz in the 1890s
(1) The National Radio Astronomy Observatory is a facility of the National Science Foundation, operated under cooperative agreement by Associated Universities, Inc.
2215
Legal Systems Very Different from Ours
This is an old page, put up as part of a course I taught in 2012. The more recent draft is here . The final draft of this book has now been published and is available on Amazon as either a paperback or a kindle .
2216
Undershoot: Parsing theory in 1965
Jeffrey Kegler's blog about Marpa, his new parsing algorithm, and other topics of interest
2217
Commodore 64 BASIC inside a USB Connector
Tomu is a super cheap Open Source Hardware 24 MHz ARM computer with 8 KB of RAM and 64 KB of ROM that fits into your USB connector! Of course I had to put Commodore 64 BASIC on it, which can be accessed through the USB-Serial port exposed by the device.
2218
Version Control Before Git with CVS
What it was like using version control before distributed repositories and commit graphs.
2219
Dark Side of the Mac: Appearance and Materials
One of the most exciting announcements at this WWDC was the introduction of a long-awaited “dark mode” in macOS 10.14 Mojave, which lets you use a whole desktop with all the apps on it in a dark theme, instead of just the dock and the menu bar as before.
2220
Perhaps it is simpler to say that Intel was disrupted
Disruption is simple to say but there many factors at play. Disruption is never one feature, but a full set of assumptions that go into a…