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The machines of Tatjana van Vark
Building scientific instruments from the past, along with other technical projects.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 422 posts.
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Age of Invention: How the Dutch Did It Better
You’re reading Age of Invention, my newsletter on the causes of the British Industrial Revolution and the history of innovation.
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AARON: AI Art Generator from 1973
Harold Cohen (1928 – 2016) explored AI and art for nearly 50 years before we saw the rising popularity of these new machine learning tools. In those five decades, Cohen worked on a single program called Aaron that involved teaching a robot to create drawings. Aaron’s education took a similar pa
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My long goodbye to Windows XP (2022)
Making glulam of the tree of knowledge.
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Bell Labs gave up its roof to patch the Statue of Liberty
It’s 1986 and you’ve got a 31 tons of copper, in the form of a giant 46 meter tall statue, that’s looking a bit worse for wear.
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The microcode and hardware in the 8086 processor that perform string operations
Intel introduced the 8086 microprocessor in 1978. This processor ended up being hugely influential, setting the path for the x86 architec...
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How HyperCard got its color back
Uli’s blog on programming, game development, pop culture and other boring things.
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iAPX432: Gordon Moore, Risk and Intel’s Super-CISC Failure
The legacy of Intel's over-ambitious 32-bit 'micromainframe' failure.
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The outside investigation of SoftRAM 95 (2021)
It had a plan, but didn't quite execute on it.
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The Joy of Computer History Books
When I was a child, growing up in the 80s, I read pretty much anything I could find about computers. There was not a lot translated to French. I even read the MS-DOS Version 5 Reference Guide. The cover was dry and the content was not very tasty either.
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PC keyboard hides an interesting secret
I found this keyboard on eBay recently, although it wasn’t quite the one I was looking for I still think it is interesting. Let me show you why. This is the keyboard, and you would be forgiven for…
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When SVG almost got network support for raw sockets
SVG Phone Home
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When Google paid websites to promote Firefox
Having grown up in the 2000s, I love discovering that things I presumed were banal back then were, in fact, part of a bigger story.
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Mach 3.5 Over Libya in an SR-71 Blackbird
In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi's terrorist camps in Libya. My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the damage our F-111's had inflicted. Qaddafi had established a 'line of death,' a territorial marking…
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Infinite Mac: Infinitemac.org
tl;dr: Infinite Mac has a new home at infinitemac.org . Using a new Emscripten port of Mini vMac, it is now able to run almost every notable version of Mac OS, from 1984’s System 1.0 to 2000’s Mac OS 9.0.4 . The project is also now accepting donations (via GitHub Sponsors or PayPal ).
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Red Hat 30th anniversary
To help us celebrate three decades of open source innovation, State of North Carolina Governor Roy Cooper declared March 26, 2023, as Red Hat Day across North Carolina.
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A brief history of APFS (2022)
Born secretly on 27 March 2017, it was Apple’s biggest gamble. Introduced in High Sierra, it didn’t work on Fusion Drives and had other problems. Also explains version numbering.
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The RIAA vs. Steve Jobs
We had no idea how close we came to being crushed.
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The Odd Story of Factory-Downgraded 486s (2020)
Counterfeits CPU were very common in the mid-90s. The worst period was between 1993 (just after the launch of the Intel 486 DX2) and 1998 (when the Pentium II started to be multiplier-locked). It was extremely easy for tricksters to remove the original marking and reprint another one with a higher f
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Reverse-engineering the Globus INK, a Soviet spaceflight navigation computer
One of the most interesting navigation instruments onboard Soyuz spacecraft was the Globus INK, 1 which used a rotating globe to indicate...
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Gordon Moore, Intel Co-Founder, Dies at 94
Moore, who set the course for the future of the semiconductor industry, devoted his later years to philanthropy.
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When did New York start building slowly?
(Note: the analysis below of floor plate size vs construction speed is incorrect due to autocorrelation effects.
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Robots have been about to take all the jobs for 100 years
We will be exploring the history of fears about technological unemployment.
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Bob Metcalfe wins Turing Award
The A.M. Turing Award, ACM's most prestigious technical award, is given for major contributions of lasting importance to computing.
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Twenty-five years of curl
Time flies when you are having fun. Today is curl's 25th birthday. The curl project started out very humbly as a small renamed URL transfer tool that almost nobody knew about for the first few years. It scratched a personal itch of mine, Me back then I made that first curl release and I've packaged … Continue reading…
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Plane Lands/Takes Off in Only 20 Feet (2013)
I posted a video earlier today of a Super Cub airplane landing on the side of a mountain. Super Cubs are ideal for that undertaking because of their low stall s
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Something Pretty Right: The History and Legacy of Visual Basic
How Visual Basic became the world’s most dominant programming environment, its sudden fall from grace, and why its influence is still shaping the future of software development.
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Reverse-engineering the multiplication algorithm in the Intel 8086 processor
While programmers today take multiplication for granted, most microprocessors in the 1970s could only add and subtract — multiplication r...