The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
For significant contributions to the history of computing, in particular pioneering the C++ programming language, Bjarne Stroustrup has been named … <a href="https://www.cs.columbia.edu/2017/bjarne-stroustrup-awarded-2017-faraday-medal/" class="more-link">Continue reading <span class="screen-reader-text">Bjarne…
Question for Quote Investigator: I was looking through a collection of woefully inaccurate pronouncements delivered by experts, and I saw a remark attributed to Ken Olsen, a prominent computer industry pioneer who founded the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) which built minicomputers. DEC was perfectly positioned…
I worked at Microsoft for about 7 years total, from 1994 to 1998, and from 2002 to 2006. The most frustrating year of those seven was the ...
As had been rumored for a while, Oracle effectively killed Solaris on Friday . When I first saw this, I had assumed that this was merely a deep cut, but in talking to Solaris engineers still at Oracle, it is clearly much more than that. It is a cut so deep as to be fatal: the core Solaris engineering organization lost…
When an experiment with existing open source technology just cherry-picks results to make it look good
This is a pseudo-transcript for a talk on branch prediction given at Two Sigma on 8/22/2017 to kick off "localhost", a talk series organized by RC .
Tomorrow I head for “ Sci Foo ” at the Googleplex. I proposed a discussion session there, “Are We Becoming Less Cooperative? If So, Why?” and I’d like to use today’s blog to help…
X-Windows is the Iran-Contra of graphical user interfaces: a tragedy of political compromises, entangled alliances, marketing hype, and just plain greed. X-Windows is to memory as Ronald Reagan was to money. Years of "Voodoo Ergonomics" have resulted in an unprecedented memory deficit of gargantuan proportions…
UPDATE 15/05 - DO NOT BUY FROM PEOPLE PRODUCING MODIFIED CARTS, the readme file specifically bans making money from this patch. Since this work is given away entirely for free, a modified cart is worth the same as an unmodified one. If you buy from someone making carts to sell, then you're support
[This memoir essay appeared in the magazine Science 82 in April 1982, and in my 1982 book Infinity and the Mind. It’s based on the “Conversations With Godel” documented in my previous post. Some of the photos are from a recent trip through the West, others from the 1970s.] [This is a cropped version of
This is the prototype for the soul of The Sims, which Will Wright wrote on January 23, 1997.
On August 11, 1987, Bill Atkinson announced a new product from Apple for the Macintosh; a multimedia, easily programmed system called HyperCard. HyperCard brought into one sharp package the ability for a Macintosh to do interactive documents with calculation, sound, music and graphics. It was a popular package, and…
“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States.” — Max Noel, FBI (ret.) Recently, I had my head torn off by a b…
I’ve been pondering this subject for a while, and I think I’m finally ready to write about it. Tcl was, for many years, my go-to language of choice. It’s still near and dear to me…
When Tim Berners-Lee announced HTML in 1991 there was no method of styling pages. How a given HTML tag was rendered was determined by the browser, often with significant input from the user’s preferences
MS Paint fans rejoice: The original art app isn’t going anywhere – except to the Windows Store for free!
The Library Innovation Lab is growing knowledge and community by bringing library principles to technological frontiers.
Lately I’ve been reading old computing papers, articles, journals, magazines, and memos and tweeting about them as I work my way through. The most recent exploration was of an Apple internal memo about the history of Apple’s involvement with Pascal. The memo is cursory, but it does provide an interesting snapshot of…
Underneath the London Underground, lies another city
Google trends, Apple, Google Chrome and plenty of developers put a cross on Flash. In my opinion without Flash the current web tech stack might look different. Credentials I wrote my first line of code in ActionScript 2.0 it was 13 years ago and it was streamlined with the style of web. Big boom of
Richard Serra? Carlota Fay Schoolman? Steve Atkins? Tom Johnson? Claire Wolfe? Andrew Lewis? blue_beetle? Tim O’Reilly?
