The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 359 posts.
Around twenty years ago, people would have laughed if you told them that videogames would end up at the Smithsonian, but the Half-Life team really did want to make games that were more than just throwaway toys. The rule against cinematics — which made our jobs much harder and also ended up leaving a lot of my favorite…
Or, the early history of Intel Corporation
"If you don't perceive using the Internet in the 2020s to be a constant fight, you have absolutely no online privacy whatsoever." Lynx br...
Why does this ancient society capture the modern imagination?
I’m a child of the 1970s and I’m glad I never knew about the Sony FX-300 “Jackal 300.” It would have been the ultimate unobtainable machine of my dreams…this, even des…
Oh look what you just made there.
It’s been awhile since I’ve looked at an architecture that’s completely new to me, and I haven’t done any since creating my new scheme for dedicated platform guides. I’…
For the last month, I have been working through Nand2Tetris: The Elements of Computing Systems; Building a Modern Computer from First Principles . I recently completed part 1. This first half of the text illuminates the process of building a computer purely from elementary logic gates. Each chapter is comprised of an…
The other enterprise Linux company
When I was younger, I played a lot of MUDs (“ Multi-User Dungeons ” — the text-only predecessors of modern MMORPGs, often played over Telnet ). They were great fun, particularly during high school: a lightweight multiplayer game with no client state meant you could log in from any machine in any lab, even Windows…
Or, the Story of Digital Equipment Corporation
From the highly eclectic blog of Mark Dominus
Recently, I covered some of the history of Ethernet's tenuous relationship with installed telephone cabling . That article focused on the earlier and more business-oriented products, but many of you probably know that there have been a number of efforts to install IP networking over installed telephone wiring in a…
Shipping large software to end-user devices is a complicated process. Shipping large software securely to end-user devices is even more complicated. Signing the things that ship to end-user devices is
Findings resolve “steppe hypothesis” enigma
Frank Lloyd Wright was an outspoken advocate for low-density cities without skyscrapers. With this in mind, it’s hard to believe the tower design pictured above came from Wright. It’s called The Illinois , and it was planned to be a mile (1,609 meters, or 5,280 feet) in height. That’s more than fou
Why I believe 6502 instruction set is a good first assembly language
The MP3 format, once the gold standard for digital audio files, is now free. The licensing and patents on MP3 encoders have expired, meaning you can now include them in your applications without payin
Nine is a small, seemingly impossible C64 demo that I released at Fjälldata 2025.
As the PS2 turns 20 in Japan, a look back on its PS1 backwards compatibility from the eyes of the former Sony engineer responsible for it.
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Caja de herramientas para construir idiomas (en español; traducido por Renato Montes) O Kit de Construção de Línguas (em português; traduzido por Gustavo Pereira) Il Kit di Costruzione di Linguaggi (in italiano; tradotto per Daniele "MadMage" Calisi) Der Sprachbaukasten (auf Deutsch; übersetzt von Carsten Becker)
What is the origin of the word "mainframe", referring to a large, complex computer? Most sources agree that the term is related to the frame...
Depending on your age, your first computer might have been an Apple II, a Radio Shack TRS-80, an IBM PC, an Apple Macintosh, or another of the early personal computers. If you missed these early machines the first time around, perhaps you have seen them in the Personal Computer section of the Revolution exhibit at the…
This is a story about restoring and upgrading a Commodore Amiga 1000, the first model of the Amiga series. Many of you might be familiar with the popular Amiga 500 or later models, but the Commodore Amiga 1000 was actually the first model of the Amiga series produced. I consider the A1000 a significant piece of home…
The source code for the Pebble operating system in now open, to support the volunteer community maintaining Pebble watches.
