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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 3: Inside the disk drive
I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto — a legendary minicomputer from 1973 that helped set the direction for personal computing. This post desc...
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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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Anatomy of a World War I Artillery Barrage
A lot has been said about the role of artillery in World War I, in both its intensity and ferocity. On the opening day of the Somme on July 1, 1916, British guns hurled 250,000 high explosive and s…
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The Hunt for the Death Valley Germans
This is the tale of what for me was a rather remarkable adventure. It was assembled on the basis of my personal recollection and experience, emails, GPS logs and some official documents. It represents solely the perspective and opinions of myself, in my more lucid moments. It is in no way intended to represent th
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Restoring Y Combinator's Xerox Alto, day 2: Repairing the display
This post describes how we repaired the monitor from a Xerox Alto. The Alto was a revolutionary computer, designed in 1973 at Xerox PARC ...
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Happy 20th Birthday, Quake
Twenty years. Wow. Where has all the time gone? We've all had many adventures during those years and Quake spawned many a game franchise and/or game company whether directly or through its influence. For this 20th I'm going to share a document created by Joost Shuur called QUAKETALK 95. This Quak
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Restoring YC's Xerox Alto, day 1: Power supplies and disk interface
A few days ago, I wrote about how I'm helping restore a Xerox Alto for Y Combinator. This new post describes the first day of restoration...
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Y Combinator's Xerox Alto: restoring the legendary 1970s GUI computer
Alan Kay recently gave his 1970's Xerox Alto to Y Combinator and I'm helping with the restoration of this legendary system. The Alto was t...
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ZFS: Apple’s New Filesystem That Wasn’t
Prologue (2006) I attended my first WWDC in 2006 to participate in Apple’s launch of their DTrace port to the next version of Mac OS X (Leopard). Apple…
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SimCity: Will Wright's City in a Box
In “The Seventh Sally,” a story by the great Polish science-fiction writer Stanislaw Lem, a god-like “constructor” named Trurl comes upon a former tyrant named Excelsius, now exiled to a lonely asteroid by the peoples of the planets he used to terrorize. Upon learning of Trurl’s powers, Excelsius demands that he…
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I finally finished this awesome game called Photoshop, let me send you a video
Practical development throughout the evolution of Windows.
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The tyranny of the Hollerith punched card
Wherein the author discusses (another) accident of history.
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Safe VSP – 30 year old Commodore 64 bug demystified (2013)
I contributed this one-filer to the C64 Demo compo at Datastorm 2013 . It ended up on 7th place, which I consider quite good for a technical proof of concept.
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DB-19: Resurrecting an Obsolete Connector
Oh man, this is good! You’re looking at the first DB-19 connector to be made in the 21st century:
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Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)
Letters between John W Backus and Edsger W Dijkstra, 1979
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Whither Plan 9? History and motivation
Wherein the author discusses the Plan 9 operating system. First of several.
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Solomon Golomb (1932–2016)
Stephen Wolfram shares a glimpse into his conversations with Solomon Golomb, developments on shift registers, polyominoes, scientific contributions.
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They knew it was round, damn it
Last week saw various reports about a rare stolen copy of a Columbus letter that had turned up in the Library of Congress and has now been restored to its Italian owners; a comparatively happy end …
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Visual Basic Turns 25
That’s right! Today marks the 25th (“Silver Anniversary”) since VB first debuted to the world. It seems like just yesterday I’d only been at Microsoft a little over a year when VB turned 20. Looking back at the progress of 5 years—a complete revamp of the IDE and debugger, a trove of new language features, […]
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Generation Nintendo
In the final months of World War II, when the United States was trying to burn out the will of a starving Japan via the most sustained campaign of aerial incendiary bombardment in history, a handful of obvious targets remained strangely untouched. Among those targets was Kyoto: population 1 million plus, founded in…
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Thousands of Hip Hop Mix Tapes, Why Not
For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been uploading thousands of Hip-hop Mixtapes into the archive. The resulting collection still has a way to go before it’s everything I have acquired a…
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A Historical Tour of Silicon Valley
A tour of Silicon Valley
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Shuffleboard at McMurdo
Somewhere below the Antarctic circle, I catch Tatiana, the waitress from the port side dining room, in a moment of leisure.