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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 422 posts.
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IBM PC 8088 replaced with a Motorola 68000
I was wondering what the IBM Personal Computer would have been like if they had chosen the Motorola 68000 instead of the Intel 8088, so I used my MCL86+ to emulate the 68000 and find out! The MCL86…
273
Has Apple sounded the last POST?
Power-on self-test routines are widespread in electronics, and one of the oldest features in personal computers. Do Apple silicon Macs run them?
274
The Viterbi Algorithm at 50 (2017)
In a noisy world, it allows you to be heard.
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The Backbone: A History of the Internet
This page provides a single entry point to all the posts in the story of how the world got online. Now available as a book, buy here. The Backbone: Introduction One System, Universal Service? The U…
276
The decline and fall of the hit instrumental song
Nowadays vocalists control popular music—but that wasn't always true
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The Bronze Age has never looked stronger
It’s 1178 BCE and the sun never sets on the Ugaritic Empire/Kassite Federation/Old Babylonion Empire/Ugaritic trade network! And it’s all thanks to bronze, the hardest and most durable metal to ever come down the pike. Yes, whether you’re looking to smelt or cast, whether you need an ingot or a rhyton, a double-headed…
279
The Rocky Horror Coffin Clock
It’s astounding. Time is fleeting. Madness takes its toll…
280
Memoirs from the old web: IE's crazy content rating system
Today, Internet Explorer has been consigned to the dustbin of history, yet its quirks and peculiar features remain an interesting area of discussion from a historical perspective. There was one particular feature of IE which not only now seems comically naive, but also completely impractical: namely, IE tried to…
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Steve Jobs and the actually usable computer (2011)
At a sad time at which the world has just lost Steve Jobs, it is well to reflect on some of the things which he, his passion, and his creations have given us, as now the technical community should take...
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Feynman’s Maze-Running Story
Richard Feynman recounts an amazing anecdote about philosophy of science; we trace it to a forgotten University of Michigan research programme into ‘floor cues’.
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Savings and Loan Crisis 1980–1989
In the 1980s, the financial sector suffered through a period of distress that was focused on the nation's savings and loan industry.
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Memoirs from the old web: The KEYGEN element
The <keygen/> element is probably one of the weirdest elements ever added to HTML:
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The web’s most important decision
I got a bit caught up this month, so I had to delay a couple of things, but I’ll be […]
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The King doesn't own all the swans in Britain
So who does?
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The Next Generation in Graphics, Part 1: Three Dimensions in Software
“Mathematics,” wrote the historian of science Carl Benjamin Boyer many years ago, “is as much an aspect of culture as it is a collection of algorithms.” The same might be said about the mathematical algorithms we choose to prioritize — especially in these modern times, when the right set of formulas can be worth many…
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Highway to Ruin: The crash of Southern Airways flight 242 (2022)
When a Southern Airways DC-9 loses both engines during a storm, an attempt to land it on a rural highway goes horribly wrong.
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RISC on a Chip: David Patterson and Berkeley RISC-I
David Patterson and team at UC Berkeley give RISC its name and make the first RISC microprocessor design.
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The Commission for Stopping Further Improvements
How to “embarrass and shackle the progress of improvement tomorrow by recording and registering as law the prejudices or errors of today”
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Why did Prolog lose steam? (2010)
Its declarative lunch was partly eaten
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The colorful charm of Amiga utility disks
Commodore produced a great many Amiga models, but for several years the gold standard was an Amiga 500 expanded with half a meg of RAM (bringing the total to a full megabyte) and an external floppy drive (bringing the total number to two). For the demo scene , this was the only Amiga configuration that mattered during…
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The inner beauty of a Tesla Stropkov DS 3600 telephone from the early 1980s
This is a DS 3600 analog telephone made by Tesla Stropkov in about 1982. It's still functional and to my mind it's absolutely beautiful. Bu...
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The Decade of Deep Learning
As the 2010’s draw to a close, it’s worth taking a look back at the monumental progress that has been made in Deep Learning in this decade.[1] Driven by the development of ever-more powerful comput
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Running SunOS 4 in QEMU (Sparc)
SunOS is a historical UNIX operating system widely used from the mid 80s into the early/mid 90s. Older versions of QEMU struggled to emulate the SPARC platform that SunOS ran on, but QEMU v7.2 supports SPARC well enough to install and run SunOS without any unusual workarounds.
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RePalm
Dmitry.GR: PalmOS on new hardware!
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OpenVMS 9.2 for x86 is finally available for hobbyists
Published: 09-04-2023 23:59 | Last update: 11-04-2023 22:29 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
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Reverse-engineering the division microcode in the Intel 8086 processor
While programmers today take division for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — division required a sl...