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The sound of the dialup, pictured (2012)
If you ever connected to the Internet before the 2000s, you probably remember how it sounded. But what do these sounds mean?
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History & Retro Computing
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Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer
If you have read any of Chuck Moore's work, you know that he is an extreme programmer in the literal sense of the word: a unique philosophy that embraces small, fast, self-contained programs in a spare language and an impressive development environment. But as I read the opening sections of Moore's book Programming a…
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Implementing VisiCalc (2003)
I'm writing this in preparation for the Computer History Museum's The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc panel on April 8th 2003. This is basically a draft and I hope to do some more editing as time permits and you should expect many typos until then. I'm also going to continue to edit and change this as I remember…
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When did the golden age of The Simpsons end?
It’d be difficult to argue against the fact that The Simpsons isn’t quite the show it once was. Even just a quick glance at the IMDb ratings is enough to see that the show is routinely not hitting the highs it did so regularly in the earlier seasons. I’d suggest...
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The Long Way Round (2014)
The morning of 6th January 1942 was a going to be a cold one. Not that this was unusual for New York, mused the controller manning LaGuardia’s airport’s tower, but it meant he’d have to remember to wrap up extra warm when he headed home.
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The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
Be sure to read the comment from Alan Kay at the bottom of the article! We succeeded in running the Smalltalk-76 language on our vintag...
2318
Were There Dark Ages?
[Warning: non-historian arguing about history, which is always dangerous and sometimes awful. I will say in my defense that I’m drawing off the work of plenty of good historians like Bryan Wa…
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Boiling lead and black art: a history of mathematical typography
Math fonts from six different type systems, courtesy Chalkdust
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Inside the vintage Xerox Alto's display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working
In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightb...
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“Peer review” is younger than we think
This is a blog post I've had sitting around in some form for a few years; I wanted to post it today because: 1) It's about peer review, a...
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Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (2003)
A notorious ‘second-system effect‘ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’; sometimes, after the…
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Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Heads up: This post is going to have some rougher language than what I normally post. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of things teenagers type into videogame text parsers, which means we’re going to get into some naughty words and otherwise unusual subject matter for this blog. I don’t know why I’m warning…
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Building and using a 29-year-old compiler on a modern system
In this post I’ll share my experience of building and using one of the earliest versions of the GNU C Compiler — GCC 1.27 (released in 1988) on a modern system.
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A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author
July was BASIC Month over at r/Retrobattlestations and for that competition I decided to reach for my TI-99/4A and type in a TI Extended BASIC game called Pearl Harbor from the 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games…for … Continue reading →
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“There Is No Reason for Any Individual to Have a Computer in Their Home”
Question for Quote Investigator: I was looking through a collection of woefully inaccurate pronouncements delivered by experts, and I saw a remark attributed to Ken Olsen, a prominent computer industry pioneer who founded the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which built minicomputers. DEC was perfectly positioned…
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The Windows Shutdown crapfest (2006)
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the ...
2334
The sudden death and eternal life of Solaris
As had been rumored for a while, Oracle effectively killed Solaris on Friday . When I first saw this, I had assumed that this was merely a deep cut, but in talking to Solaris engineers still at Oracle, it is clearly much more than that. It is a cut so deep as to be fatal: the core Solaris engineering organization lost…
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How I failed to replicate an $86M project in 1 line of code
When an experiment with existing open source technology just cherry-picks results to make it look good
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A history of branch prediction
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
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The Strange Disappearance of Cooperation in America (2013)
Tomorrow I head for “ Sci Foo ” at the Googleplex. I proposed a discussion session there, “Are We Becoming Less Cooperative? If So, Why?” and I’d like to use today’s blog to help…
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X: The First Fully Modular Software Disaster
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
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Metal Slug 2 – reducing the slowdown (2015)
UPDATE 15/05 - DO NOT BUY FROM PEOPLE PRODUCING MODIFIED CARTS, the readme file specifically bans making money from this patch. Since this work is given away entirely for free, a modified cart is worth the same as an unmodified one. If you buy from someone making carts to sell, then you're support