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20 Years Later
Almost exactly twenty years ago I started writing a short article about the problems with string theory. I had been thinking about doing this for quite a while, and the timing of entering the twent…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 242 posts.
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Architecture of the Game Boy Advance
An in-depth analysis that explains how this console works internally
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Visions of Alt-Berlin in “Man in the High Castle” (2017)
An MIT urban planner looks at the alternative vision for a Berlin that was designed to last a thousand years, but never built.
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Lode Runner
It’s always been a bit of a balancing act to decide which games I write about in detail here — a matter of balancing my level of personal interest in each candidate against its historical importance. In the early years of this project especially, when I still saw it as focusing almost exclusively on narrative-oriented…
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Operation Elop: The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones (2017)
The final years of Nokia’s mobile phones
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The cleverest floppy disc protection ever? Western Security Ltd
Introduction I've been on a bit of a floppy disc protection odyssey recently. This will probably be the last floppy disc related post for so...
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Where Did Combinators Come From? Hunting the Story of Moses Schönfinkel
A dive into the unknown personal and academic history of the mathematician who developed combinators, Moses Schönfinkel.
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That Dothraki Horde, Part I: Barbarian Couture
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020121 points103 commentscited by 6History & Retro Computing details
This series is now available in audio format. You can find the playlist here. This is the first part of a three four part (I, II, III, IV) look at the Dothraki, the fictional horse-borne nomads of …
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A spellchecker used to be a major feat of software engineering (2008)
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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Making Playstation 1 Modchips (2018)
When I was young I owned a PlayStation 1 (PS1). It was one of the first, if not the first, game consoles I owned and it had a profound effect on my future. I can trace the history of how I got involved in computers back to playing and modding
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Little Things That Made Amiga Great
To most people, the Amiga is probably synonymous with the Amiga 500 and that machine was, above all, a video game: something into which you plonked 3.5" floppy disks that transported you to strange, wonderful worlds and hours of fun. To this group, the gamers, the operating system wasn't important. They probably…
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Guybrush Fact vs. Fiction
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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Bring back the ease of 80s and 90s personal computing
Desktop computer systems, especially those based on Linux, are way more complicated than typical personal computers in the 80s and 90s. We…
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What would happen if computers never got any faster?
My first computer was a BBC Micro. It could do basic graphics at a resolution of 640×256 - with 8 different colours. Not a typo. Eight! The mono speaker produced bleeps and bloops. It was basic, in all senses of the word. Eventually, talented hackers found a way for it to do simplistic 3D graphics and even speech…
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FrontPage: The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly
Microsoft FrontPage has its thorns, but don't discount the fact that those thorns are attached to a rose.
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Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla and the Unfortunate Implications
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020352 points302 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
We’re going to be a bit silly this week (in part because the ending of this compressed semester has left me with little time) and talk about the recently released historical action-RPG comput…
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Reverse engineering a forgotten 1970s Intel dual core beast: 8271, a new ISA
" As I recall, those two chips were fairly large. And fairly late -- to the marketplace. We had lots of issues with them. [...] Sometimes th...
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The Largest Gypsy Ghetto in Europe – Stolipinovo, Bulgaria (2016)
Recently listed as the number one worse place on the planet to take a short vacation, Stolipinovo is a shocking parallel world that defies belief.
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Why Military History?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020136 points63 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, I want to talk about the discipline of military history: what it is, why it is important and how I see my own place within it. This is going to be a bit of an unusual collections post as…
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Origins of the youtube-dl project
As you may know, as of the time this text is being written youtube-dl’s repository at GitHub is blocked due to a DMCA takedown letter received by GitHub on behalf of the RIAA. While I cannot comment on the current maintainers' plans or ongoing discussions, in light of the claims made in that letter I thought it would…
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AppleCrate II: A New Apple II-Based Parallel Computer (2015)
In 2004 I built the first AppleCrate , an 8-board system, as an inexpensive, easy to program vehicle for experiments in parallel programming�a kind of "blade server" for the Apple II, if you will! AppleCrate I (at the time I didn't realize that it was number "I" ;-) was great fun, and it enabled some very interesting…
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The election of the doge
The ruler of Medieval Venice was chosen by an exceptionally complex ten-step process of alternating random lots and elections.
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Restoring a 37 Year-Old IBM F Mechanical Keyboard
I wanted to share my journey from start to finish to restore a 1983 IBM Model F XT mechanical keyboard to it's former glory. It includes...
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What “Roguelike” Meant
Several recently released games have rekindled the old discussions on the meaning of the word “roguelike”. This post is an attempt to…
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Addendum: Crucible Steel and Cast Iron
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020281 points25 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, as an addendum to our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb) look at pre-modern iron and steel production, we’re going to look at two alternative regional processes, where th…