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Martin Luther King Jr. was wiretapped
Chris Hayes of MSNBC reminds us that the good guys and bad guys of history are not entirely clear as they're happening. Heather Parton of digsby blog passes along a transcript of his recent...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 3,229 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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You commit three felonies a day
In a book called Three Felonies A Day, Boston civil rights lawyer Harvey Silverglate says that everyone in the US commits felonies everyday and if the governmen
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Using Metadata to Find Paul Revere
London, 1772. I have been asked by my superiors to give a brief demonstration of the surprising effectiveness of even the simplest techniques of the new-fangled Social Networke Analysis in the pursuit of those who would seek to undermine the liberty enjoyed by His Majesty’s subjects. This is in connection with the…
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Feynman vs. The Abacus
A Japanese man came into the restaurant. I had seen him before, wandering around; he was trying to sell abacuses. He started to talk to the waiters, and challenged them: He said he could add numbers faster than any of them could do.
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The History of Joy Division’s “Unknown Pleasures” Album Art
I had no intention of ever learning this much about Joy Division or pulsars, but because of my apt to be a law abiding citizen, I was forced to research the about the ubiquitous design made popular by the British band and artist Peter Saville for a t-shirt project I’m heading on SixPrizes. In short, […]
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How I coded in 1985
Back in 1985 I worked on the computerization of a machine designed to stick labels on bottles. The company that made the machines was using...
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"Asswipe," replied Yahoo's server. That's when I knew I had it
Yahoo's public chat rooms have passed away . It is for the best, for the spam had spread everywhere. But they had a good run, operating for a decade and a half, an Internet eternity.
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The Well Deserved Fortune of Satoshi Nakamoto, Bitcoin creator
I won’t discuss anything in this post. I’m tired of discussing technical things with people with skewed opinions and monetary interest. I’ve talked enough in the Bitcointalk forum…
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Assembly Routine for Realtime Decoding of Floppy Data
The little routine presented here is, with all due humbleness, hands down the best code I ever wrote. It is esoteric and might not appeal to the masses, and it certainly has no commercial value. But in terms of personal satisfaction at a job well done, this is about as good as it gets. Here's why:
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Extracting Audio from Pictures of Gramophone Recordings
Three years ago, a survey team identified a staggering 569,148 time-based media objects on the Bloomington campus of Indiana University—that’s over half a million sound recordings, video recordings…
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Memories of Mozilla at 15 and Thoughts on Mozilla Research
I gave a brief talk last night at the Mozilla Research Party (first of a series), which happened to fall on the virtual (public, post-Easter-holiday) celebration of Mozilla’s 15th anniversary .
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Building Photoshop 1.0
On February 13, 2013, the Computer History Museum reported that they had received the source code for version 1.1 of Photoshop from Adobe, and had permission to release it for non-commercial use. This is the second time recently that something like this has happened, the first being the release of the Quickdraw and…
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Two Letters from Steve Jobs
During the 12+ years I worked at Apple I never met with Steve Jobs for work purposes. Of course like all Apple employees I saw Steve in Caffé Macs or walking with Jony Ive around the courtyard insi…
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Why is my TI-99/4A in Black and White?
My first computer was a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A. Longtime readers may remember a previous article where we implemented TI-99/4A BASIC as a Scripting Language for modern computers. Recently I got nostalgic for the actual hardware so I got my 99 out of the closet where it had been for a decade o…
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The largest computer ever built
While cold war jets are an old interest of mine, almost everything built to fight the cold war fascinates me. All ages are characterized by madness; only a few have that madness captured in physica…
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Matt Groening's Artwork for Apple
The story that The Simpsons' creator Matt Groening once illustrated a brochure for Apple back in 1989 has been making the rounds of the internet for a while now. However, in addition to that brochure, Groening did other artwork for Apple around that same time period. For anyone unfamiliar, Apple hired Groening to…
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DWIM
1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided.
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Could the ancient Romans have built a digital computer?
The Romans were undoubtedly master engineers. They were experts at civil engineering, building roads, improving sanitation, inventing Roman concrete, and constructing aqueducts that adhere to tolerances impressive even by today’s standards. Perhaps the best evidence of their aptitude is the fact that many of those…