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How to get people who installed a leaked build to stop using that build?
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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A Rocket to Nowhere (2005)
The Space Shuttle Discovery is up in orbit, safely docked to the International Space Station, and for the next five days, astronauts will be busy figuring out whether it's safe for them to come home. In the meantime, the rest of the Shuttle fleet is grounded (confined to base, not allowed to play with its spacecraft…
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What’s up with the Beep driver in Windows 7? (2010)
Access to this page requires authorization. You can try signing in or changing directories .
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Sierra Gets Creative
Coming out of Sierra On-Line’s 1984 near-death experience , Ken Williams made a prognostication from which he would never waver: that the real future of home as well as business computing lay with the open, widely cloned hardware architecture of IBM’s computers, running Microsoft’s operating systems. He therefore…
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Amazon EC2 Beta (2006)
Innovation never takes a break, and neither do I. From the steaming hot beaches of Cabo San Lucas I would like to tell you about the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud, or Amazon EC2, now open for limited beta testing, with more beta slots to open soon. Amazon EC2 gives you access to a virtual computing […]
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Dinosaur and Lisp
Dinosaur is old enough, as well as Lisp, they may like each other. When I am talking about dinosaur here, I mean the dinosaur hiding in Google Chrome, it shows up when "There is no Internet connection".
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More, less, and a story of typical Unix fossilization
You're probably reading this page because you've attempted to access some part of my blog (Wandering Thoughts) or CSpace , the wiki thing it's part of. Unfortunately you're using a browser version that my anti-crawler precautions consider suspicious, most often because it's too old (most often this applies to versions…
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Mainframes as a lifestyle choice
I started working at IBM last year on mainframe compilers with the goal of making mainframes feel a little more modern. Hence, a lot of my time is spent in z/OS . The interface I use to z/OS is Unix System Services (USS, a.k.a. the command line), but if I were up for bucking the whole moderm thing, I could break out…
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Learning from Ada
This is a cautionary tale. One of youth and a lesson I eventually learned but still often don’t heed. About how sometimes, the tool that is easiest to get started with isn’t the tool that will make your job the easiest.
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The Secret Button
There's a secret button hidden in Windows 7. At least, it's a secret to some people. Many modern users won't know about it, whereas some like me have used it every day for over 25 years.
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How the Hunt Brothers Cornered the Silver Market and Then Lost It All
In 1980, two brothers from Texas controlled two-thirds of all the privately held silver on earth. This is the story of how one of history's biggest bets went bust.
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Richard Feynman and the Connection Machine
For Richard, a crazy idea was an opportunity to either prove it wrong or prove it right.
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Pete Davies: The ‘Invadar’ Arcade Collection
One of the very early committed arcade collectors here in the UK was a guy called Pete Davies. Known on the arcade forums as Invadar, he was by all accounts, very well liked. I can’t say that…
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90-year-old Cryptanalytic Efforts Must Stay Secret, says NSA
The National Security Agency is withholding 90-year-old information on early American cryptanalytic efforts against Russia and the Soviet Union from a 20-year-old document on the grounds that relea…
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Macbook charger teardown: Complexity inside Apple's power adapter (2015)
Have you ever wondered what's inside your Macbook's charger? There's a lot more circuitry crammed into the compact power adapter than you...
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In His Own Words: Gary Kildall
Gary Kildall was a pioneer of personal computer software. He wrote programming language tools, including assemblers (Intel 4004), interpreters (BASIC), and compilers (PL/M). He created a widely-used disk operating system (CP/M). He and his wife, Dorothy McEwen, started a successful company called Digital Research to…
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 4: What's running on the system
This post describes our continuing efforts to restore a Xerox Alto. We checked that the low-level microcode tasks are running correctly a...
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Hitler Uses Docker, Annotated
If you haven’t seen it, this is a very accurate and smart Downfall satire on Docker’s ecosystem, technology, and culture. It’s so good that I thought it would be instructive to an…
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The Raspberry Pi Has Revolutionized Emulation
Every geek goes through a phase where they discover emulation. It’s practically a rite of passage. I think I spent most of my childhood – and a large part of my life as a young adult – desperately wishing I was in a video game arcade. When I finally obtained my
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What ever happened to Wordstar?
One of the most interesting stories in the history of computing surrounds the dominant word processor of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s — Wordstar.
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A Proposal For the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on A.I. (1955)
A PROPOSAL FOR THE DARTMOUTH SUMMER RESEARCH PROJECT ON ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE