2701
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
2702
How medieval astronomers made trig tables
Clever tricks used by medieval astronomers to tabulate sines at every degree, before calculators and before calculus.
2703
Ten Years of World of Warcraft
WoW has always been a contradiction of sorts: not the pioneer, but the one that solidified the pattern. Not the experimenter, but the one that reaped the rewards. Not the innovator, but the one that was well-designed, built solidly, and made appealing. It was the MMO that took what has always been there, and delivered…
2704
Grumpy Gamer – SCUMM Notes from the C64
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
2705
The Generalist – On Alexander Grothendieck
I never met Alexander Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day ̵…
2706
Woz’s take on the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply
There was a recent thread about the Apple 1’s noisy -5 volt supply on Applefritter , so I asked Woz the following:
2707
The Internet Arcade
When work began on JSMESS a couple years ago, I knew that it was probably somewhat easy to do all this conversion work for MAME (the arcade side) as it was for MESS (the computer and console side).…
2708
Japanese zoning
This articles is a follow-up of this one about standard zoning practices in North America. It is advised to read the previous article to b...
2709
The Hypercard Legacy
Apple’s forgotten software gem was a last breath for democratized computing. Can it be revived?
2710
Lost Civilizations of the Andes
Fig. 5.1 Wall in in Hatunrumiyoc street, Cuzco. Polygonal stones usually have pillowed (convex) faces and bevelled, sunken joints.
2711
Rewriting Reddit (2005)
2012 note: This article was first published in 2005. After it was published, Django launched a RemovingTheMagic project to address some of my criticisms (though personally I still find it unusable), web.py inspired FriendFeed’s tornado.web and Google’s gae.webapp and others (though I still prefer web.py), and this…
2712
Engelbart's Violin (2012)
Computing pioneer Alan Kay tells us that a computer is "an instrument whose music is ideas." This seems like a beautiful metaphor, until you realize that we have somehow ended up in a world where the profession of musician is nearly unknown. To continue with this analogy, let's imagine that you were a child who loves…
2713
Medieval Desktops
We are used to having multiple books open at the same time when looking things up at home or writing an essay for class. Whether PDFs, e-books or old-fashioned paper volumes, switching between book…
2714
2715
The Etherkiller (2002)
This led to some general discussion that this particular device really is in a class of devices, now called the "killers", which need to be made.
2716
How the Z80's registers are implemented
The 8-bit Z80 microprocessor is famed for use in many early personal computers such the Osborne 1, TRS-80, and Sinclair ZX Spectrum. The Z80...
2717
Quote Origin: A Lie Can Travel Halfway Around the World While the Truth Is Putting On Its Shoes
Mark Twain? Jonathan Swift? Thomas Francklin? Fisher Ames? Thomas Jefferson? John Randolph? Charles Haddon Spurgeon? Winston Churchill? Terry Pratchett? Anonymous?
2718
M/S Estonia accident radio transcript
Transcript of VHF channel 16 on the night of the Estonia disaster.
2719
Why the Z-80's data pins are scrambled
If you look closely at the datasheet for a Z-80 chip, you'll notice the data pins are in a random-looking order. The address pins (A) are ni...
2720
Careful with that Buffer
Last week I was sorting through several sets of Microsoft C 5.1 disks from 1988 (more about that later). While I was comparing the disk images to see whether the disks were the same or not, despite different labels and part numbers, I did a double take when I realized that a file with random e-mail fragments was, in…
2721
How many Commodore 64 computers were really sold? (2011)
Nobody doubts that the C64 was the greatest selling single computer model of all time, it even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records, but nobody quite knows how many it really was: Most sources say 17 million, others say 22 or even 30 million. With a high degree of confidence, I can now…
2722
How to buy a tank: a BRDM-2 story
Your life is the best story! Just start your blog today!
2723
A scientist stole my root beer
I’m not ashamed to say that I like root beer. There’s something about the herbal and woodsy flavors that I enjoy. It’s refreshing, but also a time machine. A sip of root beer brin…
2724
1. The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown
TOF once wrote an article entitled "The Great Ptolemaic Smackdown and Down 'n Dirty Mud-Wrassle" which described the century-long progress f...
2725
2726
Lost Lessons from 8-Bit BASIC
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
2727
2728
2729
Screenshots Forever and Ever Until You Can’t Stand it
The Screen Shotgun, as mentioned before, is continuing its never-ending quest to play tens of thousands of games and programs, take screenshots, and upload them into the Internet Archive. Like any …
2730
