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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Chuck Moore, Extreme Programmer
If you have read any of Chuck Moore's work, you know that he is an extreme programmer in the literal sense of the word: a unique philosophy that embraces small, fast, self-contained programs in a spare language and an impressive development environment. But as I read the opening sections of Moore's book Programming a…
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Implementing VisiCalc (2003)
I'm writing this in preparation for the Computer History Museum's The Origins and Impact of VisiCalc panel on April 8th 2003. This is basically a draft and I hope to do some more editing as time permits and you should expect many typos until then. I'm also going to continue to edit and change this as I remember…
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Oldest recorded solar eclipse helps date the Egyptian pharaohs
Researchers have pinpointed the date of what could be the oldest solar eclipse yet recorded. The event, which occurred on 30 October 1207 BC, is mentioned in the Bible and could have consequences for the chronology of the ancient world.
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When did the golden age of The Simpsons end?
It’d be difficult to argue against the fact that The Simpsons isn’t quite the show it once was. Even just a quick glance at the IMDb ratings is enough to see that the show is routinely not hitting the highs it did so regularly in the earlier seasons. I’d suggest...
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The Long Way Round (2014)
The morning of 6th January 1942 was a going to be a cold one. Not that this was unusual for New York, mused the controller manning LaGuardia’s airport’s tower, but it meant he’d have to remember to wrap up extra warm when he headed home.
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The Xerox Alto, Smalltalk, and Rewriting a Running GUI
Be sure to read the comment from Alan Kay at the bottom of the article! We succeeded in running the Smalltalk-76 language on our vintag...
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Were There Dark Ages?
[Warning: non-historian arguing about history, which is always dangerous and sometimes awful. I will say in my defense that I’m drawing off the work of plenty of good historians like Bryan Wa…
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Boiling lead and black art: a history of mathematical typography
Math fonts from six different type systems, courtesy Chalkdust
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What I Learned from Reading Every Amazon Shareholders Letter
A new mentor of mine suggested I read Jeff Bezos’ Letter to Shareholders to refine my thoughts around building a career and a business.
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Inside the vintage Xerox Alto's display, a tiny lightbulb keeps it working
In this Alto restoration episode, we repaired a second CRT display, exercising our TV repair skills and discovering a tiny mysterious lightb...
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Digging for treasure in Aladdin’s source code
When it was released back in 1993, Disney’s Aladdin for the Sega Genesis (or Mega Drive, depending on which side of the pond you lived on through the early 90’s) was really a visually striking game. Powered by what eventually became known as “Digicel” technology, along with a solid selection of middleware and some…
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Books from 1923 to 1941 Now Liberated
[press: boingboing] The Internet Archive is now leveraging a little known, and perhaps never used, provision of US copyright law, Section 108h, which allows libraries to scan and make available materials published 1923 to 1941 if they are not being actively sold. Elizabeth Townsend Gard, a copyright scholar at Tulane…
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Debian 9.2 released
[09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.10 released [09 Dec 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.3 released [07 Oct 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.2 released [12 Aug 2017] DebConf17 closes in Montreal and DebConf18 dates announced [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 9: 9.1 released [22 Jul 2017] Updated Debian 8: 8.9 released [18 Jun 2017] Debian…
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“Peer review” is younger than we think
This is a blog post I've had sitting around in some form for a few years; I wanted to post it today because: 1) It's about peer review, a...
3017
Fairchild Semiconductor: 60th Anniversary
Fairchild’s rapid growth in revenue, number of employees, and impact on the local community can be compared to Google 40 years later
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Origins and History of Unix, 1969-1995 (2003)
A notorious ‘second-system effect‘ often afflicts the successors of small experimental prototypes. The urge to add everything that was left out the first time around all too frequently leads to huge and overcomplicated design. Less well known, because less common, is the ‘third-system effect’; sometimes, after the…
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Lost Laughs in Leisure Suit Larry
Heads up: This post is going to have some rougher language than what I normally post. We’re going to be talking about the kinds of things teenagers type into videogame text parsers, which means we’re going to get into some naughty words and otherwise unusual subject matter for this blog. I don’t know why I’m warning…
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Building and using a 29-year-old compiler on a modern system
In this post I’ll share my experience of building and using one of the earliest versions of the GNU C Compiler — GCC 1.27 (released in 1988) on a modern system.
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A Program from a 35 Year Old Magazine for BASIC Month and a Chat with Its Author
July was BASIC Month over at r/Retrobattlestations and for that competition I decided to reach for my TI-99/4A and type in a TI Extended BASIC game called Pearl Harbor from the 1983 issue of Electronic Fun with Computers & Games…for … Continue reading →
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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was awarded jointly to Jacques Dubochet, Joachim Frank and Richard Henderson "for developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution"
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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2017 was divided, one half awarded to Rainer Weiss, the other half jointly to Barry C. Barish and Kip S. Thorne "for decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves"
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2017 Nobel Prize in Medicine for the molecular mechanisms of circadian rhythm
The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2017 was awarded jointly to Jeffrey C. Hall, Michael Rosbash and Michael W. Young "for their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm"
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Processing the Page Turn
This board isn’t strictly a CPU but it is a processor of sorts. I actually purchased this board as it was described as a DEC board, with not a great picture, having not seen a DEC board with LOGIC ALUs on it I bought it. When it arrived I found it wasnt DEC at all but DSC, Digital Services Corporation. DSC was a video…
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Vladimir Voevodsky has died
The Institute for Advanced Study is deeply saddened by the passing of Vladimir Voevodsky, Professor in the School of Mathematics.Voevodsky, a truly extraordinary and original mathematician, made many contributions to the field of mathematics, earning him numerous honors and awards, including the Fields Medal.
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