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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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10th Anniversary of JQuery
Today marks the 10th anniversary of the release of jQuery. I announced it back at BarCamp NYC 2006 when I was still in college. It’s incredible to think of how far it’s come and just how many people have contributed to its success. To them I am forever grateful, thank you.
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The format of strings in early (pre-C) Unix
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Putin’s nuclear torpedo and Project Pluto
There was some wanking among the US foreign policy wonkosphere about the nuclear torpedo “accidentally” mentioned in a Russian news video. The device described in the leak is a megat…
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Reverse engineering the ARM1, ancestor of the iPhone's processor
Almost every smartphone uses a processor based on the ARM1 chip created in 1985. The Visual ARM1 simulator shows what happens inside the...
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A Requiem for Ian Murdock
I first met Ian Murdock gathered around a table at some bar, somewhere, after some conference in the late 1990s. Progeny Linux Systems' founding was soon to be announced, and Ian had invited a group from the Debian BoF along to hear about “something interesting”; the post-BoF meetup was actually a briefing on his…
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How I found one of the earliest browsers on a NeXTcube
Yesterday, the web celebrated its 25th birthday and to join in, I have a little story. A couple of years ago I found a NeXTcube. I'm not going to say where it is to avoid vandalism (the computer is publicly accessible under some circumstances without much oversight), but this is the story. Sir Tim Berners-Lee…
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Fuck the Cloud (2009)
This will be the last time I go along this area of discussion for a while because it’s just going to get very old very quickly. But I wanted, in one place, a quick manifesto/rant about this p…
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NES Graphics – Part 3
Part 1 and part 2 described CHR data, nametable based backgrounds, sprites, and scrolling. Combined, these cover nearly everything a basic NES cart can do without using additional hardware. To go any further will require a quick tangent to discuss, in detail, how rendering happens.
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The last new subway line in Japan
On December 6, 2015, the Sendai Subway’s Tōzai (East-West) Line opened. The second line of a provincial Japanese city, this event passed entirely under the radar of the Western media and ev…
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Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
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Untangling the Tale of Ada Lovelace
Stephen Wolfram shares what he learned in researching Ada Lovelace's life, writings about the Analytical Engine, and computation of Bernoulli numbers.
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Whatever happened to Channel 1?
On June 15, 1936, the FCC began informal hearings concerning the radio spectrum above 30 MHz. There was an increasing demand for those frequencies and a new word began to be heard at the FCC; that word was standards. The Radio Manufacturers Association (RMA), the trade association for the radio and television…
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Raspberry Pi Zero vs. Elliott 405
Twitter users @SadHappyAmazing and @HistoricalPics posted yesterday two photographs (copy) showing the Raspberry Pi Zero juxtaposed in front of the Norwich City Council Treasurer's Department building, where the delivery of the Elliott 405 computer was photographed in 1957. Here is how the two computers compare.
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Macbook charger teardown: surprising complexity inside Apple's power adapter
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
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Atari Vax Mail, Memos and Status Reports: 1982-1992 (2001)
I worked for Atari and then one of its successor companies (Atari Games) for 13 years, designing hardware for coin-operated video games.
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A Cabinet of Infocom Curiosities
This is big news, in the realm of game design studies. During the production of GET LAMP, I spent a lot of time digitizing or photographing all sorts of artifacts and documents related to Interacti…
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SVG Mask Artwork of the Intel 4004
The Intel 4004 after 44 years: scalable vector mask artwork, Rubylith cutters, replica PCB rev 2, printer emulator code.
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What will be the legacy of Go?
In October this year I had the privilege of speaking at the GothamGo conference in New York City. As I talk quite softly, and there were a few problems with the recording, I decided to write up my slide notes and present them here.
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Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment
Today, Wikipedia is widely considered an invaluable resource. There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it…
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80x40
The git repo as art.
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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
What did people's desktops look like?