1
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...
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 130 posts.
2
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…
3
4
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…
5
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…
6
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.
7
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…
8
Why 18th century books looked like smartphone screens (2014)
A weblog about politics, technology, and culture
9
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.
10
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…
11
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.
12
13
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...
14
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.
15
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…
16
17
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.
18
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.
19
20
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…
21
80x40
The git repo as art.
22
Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
What did people's desktops look like?
23
24
25
DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)
If you've listened to the anti-Microsoft crowd, you've probably heard this phrase. A web search returns a wide range of attributions, everything from an alleged battle cry to just short of an official company motto. The rumor being that Microsoft would intentionally break competitors' applications with each release of…
26
Yahoo Logo ASCII Animation in 462 bytes of C (2011)
[ Update 10/21/2015: Changed the title from "six lines of C" to "462 bytes of C" to avoid endless arguments about what constitutes a line of C code.]
27
19th Century Marriage Manuals: Advice for Young Husbands
Published in 1837, The Young Husband’s Book is described as a “manual of domestic duties.”
28
Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)
A long time ago, there was no Internet. Ok, there was an internet, but I lived outside of it. It was 1992 or 1993, and I only saw my first webpage and send my first email in 1995. And I was perhaps…
29
When the Steve Jobs movie came calling
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up. I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd ...
30
IBM is still making ThinkPad keyboards
This week I was doing a bit of shopping for an external keyboard for my old Thinkpad x200 laptop. I've grown used to its comfy keyboard and its trackpoint, so I looked on ebay to see if I could find one of the older external USB equivalents.