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Conquest of the Incas
I wrote about the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs five years ago during the early days of this blog. The conquistadors have since remained a fascination of mine, but I haven’t had a chance to go bac…
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 359 posts.
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Why is C the symbol for the speed of light? (2004)
"As for c , that is the speed of light in vacuum, and if you ask why c , the answer is that it is the initial letter of celeritas , the Latin word meaning speed." Isaac Asimov in "C for Celeritas (1959)" [1]
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The Lost Towers of the Guelph-Ghibelline Wars
Looks fake, doesn’t it? This implausible Medieval forest of towers, as dense as Manhattan skyscrapers, is our best reconstruction of the town of Bologna at its height, toward the end of the Medieval Guelph-Ghibelline wars. We don’t see many such towers today… or think we don’t, but actually their remnants are all over…
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The great Hobby Lobby artifact heist
How an American Evangelical arts and crafts empire managed to loot antiquities en masse from a long-lost Mesopotamian city-state. (Pt. 1 of 2)
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20 Years of YC / HN
I saw recently that YCombinator celebrated its 20th anniversary. Hacker News is slightly younger, but to me the two go hand in hand. As far as I can tell, I actively started reading Hacker News around 2011. I don’t remember how I heard about it. It was probably on Reddit or Digg. Once I found it, I started reading…
276
Past and Present Futures of User Interface Design
In 1968, Douglas Engelbart demonstrated a computer system called the oN-Line System, or NLS. The NLS is the source of a lot of computer firsts. Among other things, Engelbart showed video conferencing, collaborative text editing, embedded graphics, copying and pasting, and hypertext - all of it accessible through a…
277
Microsoft's 1986 IPO
Its market cap hit $777 million and Bill Gates' net worth reached $350 million
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Amiga 600: From the Amiga No One Wanted to Retro Favorite
Maybe putting the designer of the IBM PCjr in charge of this wasn't the best idea
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When the Dotcom Bubble Burst
The hunt for the next Microsoft created an era of excess that wasn't sustainable
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Apple's long-lost hidden recovery partition from 1994 has been found
In my last post about hard drives that go bad over time , I hinted at having rescued a lost piece of obscure Apple software history from an old 160 MB Conner hard drive that had its head stuck in the parked position. This post is going to be all about it. It’s the tale of a tad bit of an obsession, what felt like a…
282
Stoicism's appeal to the rich and powerful (2019)
I was recently interviewed for a piece in the Times on why the philosophy of stoicism has become very popular in the Silicon Valley tech crowd. Only a sliver of my thoughts made it into the article, but the question from Nellie Bowles was very stimulating so I wanted to share more of my thoughts.
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History of Maths for Beginners
In the comments on my recent post on books on the history of maths Fernando Q. Gouvêa jumped in to draw attention to the book Math Through the Ages: A Gentle History for Teachers and Othe…
284
My teen years: The transputer operating system
History of the evolution of my C compiler and operating system for transputer when I was age 16.
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So Long and Thanks for All the Words: A Toast to Douglas Adams
A Toast to the Frood Who Really Knew Where His Towel Was
286
Bending Spacetime in the Basement (1997)
Bending Spacetime in the Basement
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A technical history of Acorn Computers
These pages contain a fairly brief technical history of Acorn Computers. I have decided to focus on the technology because that is where my interests lie. Only very major non-technical events in Acorn's history have been included. If anyone finds any inaccuracies in the following pages please contact me using the link…
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GeoCities in 1995: Building a Home Page on the Internet
GeoCities, known throughout most of 1995 as Beverly Hills Internet, is one of the first commercial internet services to make it easy for people to publish a home page on the World Wide Web.
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How did places like Bell Labs know how to ask the right questions? (2023)
Alternative Title: Why all applied research organizations should hire a Bell-style systems engineer
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NetBSD on a JavaStation
Hard as it may be to imagine, there was a time when Java was brand new and exciting. Long before it became the vast clunky back-end leviathan it is today, it was going to be the ubiquitous graphical platform that would be used on everything from cell phones to supercomputers: write once, run anywhere. Initially …
292
The Golden Age of Japanese Pencils (2022)
It was the summer of 1952, and the executives of Tombow Pencil were about to revolutionize the Japanese pencil industry—or, possibly, fall flat on their faces. Hachiro Ogawa, the son of founder Harunosuke Ogawa, was Tombow's managing director, and he had just finished a years-long project, at
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Discovery of fresco portraying Dionysian mysteries at Pompeii
AN EXTREMELY RARE “MEGALOGRAPHY” OF THE 1ST CENTURY BC, LIKE THE FAMOUS VILLA OF THE MYSTERIES Over 100 years since the discovery of the Villa of the Mysteries, a large … keep it going
294
Gooey rubber that's slowly ruining old hard drives
As part of my work toward an upcoming post about a lost piece of very obscure Mac history that has finally been found, I’ve been playing around with old Apple-branded SCSI hard drives made by Quantum and Conner in the 1990s. What I’m about to describe is already common knowledge in the vintage computing world, but I…
295
Nvidia emulation journey, part 1: RIVA 128/NV3 architecture history and overview
An exploration of efforts to create a functional emulation of NVIDIA GPUs.
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iMac G4(K)
A year ago I tried using an M1 iMac for work duty but its 21" screen took up too much room on my desk. After seeing Sean's video on Action Retro about putting an M4 Mac Mini inside an iMac G4 , I thought I'd give it a try.
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Photographs of the Old West
Frederick Monsen's ethnographic photos of the American West
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Upside Down Air Force
The Air Force Research Laboratory / Information Directorate, located at the Rome Research Site (formerly Griffiss Air Force Base), tests electronic countermeasures (ECM) equipment on various airframes for blind spots in the EMC equipment, or for interference by the aircraft's external munitions on the EMC equipment…
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History of CAD
The People, Companies and Computer Systems That Changed Forever the Practice of Engineering and Manufacturing. A "Brief" History of CAD by David E. Weisberg