2791
On compiling 34 year old C code
The 34 year old C code is the C code for ed and sed from Unix Version 7. I’ve been getting it to compile on a modern POSIXish system. Some changes had to be made. But not very many. The union…
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
2792
2793
2794
2795
160-Year-Old Documents Intentionally Destroyed in Franklin County, N.C.
I rarely re-blog, but this one deserves being spread far and wide. Timeline of the Destruction of 100 Year Old Franklin County, NC Records Please read the whole post included above – but the …
2796
2797
Fixing E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial for the Atari 2600
If you're reading this page, chances are that you're already well aware that E.T. for the Atari 2600 is one of the most reviled games ever made. I never understood why. As a child, it was one of my favorite games. I still think it's a good game. Apparently , I'm not alone .
2798
2799
Bit gold (2005)
A long time ago I hit upon the idea of bit gold. The problem, in a nutshell, is that our money currently depends on trust in a third party ...
2800
2801
2802
“WarGames” Magazine Identified
As per Jargon File [1] definition number seven of Hacker [2] : "7. One who enjoys the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.", I have performed a real world hack of the movie "WarGames [3] [4] ." Through the use of my knowledge of computer magazines, my sharp eyes, and other…
2803
Perl is 26 Today
Larry Wall released Perl to the public on December 18, 1987. Love it or hate it, Perl's influence is immense.
2804
The Birth of Standard Error
Earlier today Stephen Johnson, in a mailing list run by the The Unix Heritage Society , described the birth of the standard error concept: the idea that a program's error output is sent on a channel different from that of its normal output. Over the past forty years, all major operating systems and language libraries…
2805
Reverse Engineering a Furby
Table of Contents Introduction About the Device Inter-Device Communication Reversing the Android App Reversing the Hardware Dumping the EEPROM Decapping Proprietary Chips SEM Imaging of Decapped Ch…
2806
Wil Shipley: My “Doom” 20th Anniversary Stories
The way I got into the software business (besides learning to code) was to use every piece of software I could find and send the developers ...
2807
How I introduced a 27-year-old computer to the web
Reviving an old computer is like restoring a classic car: there’s a thrill from bringing the ancient into the modern world. So it was with my first “real” computer, my Mac Plus, when I decided to bring it forward three decades and introduce it to the modern web.
2808
The origin of zero-based array indexing
“Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration.” — Stan Kelly-Bootle
2809
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow? (2006)
What Gives Gold that Mellow Glow?
2810
North Korea 2013 – A travel journal
In summer 2013 I traveled to the most isolated country in the world. I've experienced expected and unexpected things. This is my illustrated travel journal.
2811
A Testament to X11 Backwards Compatibility
I recently scored a Hewlett Packard 1670A Deep Memory Logic Analyzer and I finally had a chance to fire it up. This unit dates back to 1992 ...
2812
Satoshi Nakamoto is probably Nick Szabo?
I recently became interested in identifying the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. I started from the Bitcoin whitepaper [0] published in late 2008, and proceeded to run reverse tex…
2813
2814
2815
Quote Origin: Americans Will Always Do the Right Thing — After Exhausting All the Alternatives
Question for Quote Investigator: While watching a cable news channel I heard a commentator present a quotation that he credited to Winston Churchill. When I searched the web I found many different versions:
2816
2817
The keys to the keydom
Your security and privacy on the Internet (to the extent that such quaint notions still have meaning) depend on the difficulty of factoring certain large numbers. For example, take this 1,024-bit integer:
2818
Debugging a Live Saturn V
Writing and photos by Brennan Moore
2819
Richard Feynman: Cargo Cult Science (1974)
A carousel is a rotating set of images. Use the previous and next buttons to change the displayed slide
2820
The myth of NASA's expensive space pens
There’s a story about NASA’s incredibly expensive space pen and Russia’s simpler solution that gets trotted out every time some large organization introduces so