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Ten years ago Wikipedia was widely considered a doomed experiment
Today, Wikipedia is widely considered an invaluable resource. There are occasional errors and controversies, but for the most part it…
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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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80x40
The git repo as art.
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Screenshots from developers and Unix people taken in 2002
What did people's desktops look like?
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DOS Ain't Done Til Lotus Won't Run? (2005)
If you've listened to the anti-Microsoft crowd, you've probably heard this phrase. A web search returns a wide range of attributions, everything from an alleged battle cry to just short of an official company motto. The rumor being that Microsoft would intentionally break competitors' applications with each release of…
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Yahoo Logo ASCII Animation in 462 bytes of C (2011)
[ Update 10/21/2015: Changed the title from "six lines of C" to "462 bytes of C" to avoid endless arguments about what constitutes a line of C code.]
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19th Century Marriage Manuals: Advice for Young Husbands
Published in 1837, The Young Husband’s Book is described as a “manual of domestic duties.”
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Out of the Darkness: How two psychologists and CIA devised torture program
How two psychologists teamed up with the CIA to devise a torture program and experiment on human beings.
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Forgotten Language: Jorf could have been Python or Ruby (2005)
A long time ago, there was no Internet. Ok, there was an internet, but I lived outside of it. It was 1992 or 1993, and I only saw my first webpage and send my first email in 1995. And I was perhaps…
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When the Steve Jobs movie came calling
Last January the Steve Jobs movie came to town and called me up. I was leaving work one day when I got a phone call from a guy named Todd ...
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IBM is still making ThinkPad keyboards
This week I was doing a bit of shopping for an external keyboard for my old Thinkpad x200 laptop. I've grown used to its comfy keyboard and its trackpoint, so I looked on ebay to see if I could find one of the older external USB equivalents.
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DARE: The Anti-Drug Program That Never Actually Worked
Studies showed early on that kids who went through DARE weren't any less likely to do drugs. Why did schools keep using it?
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Haskell and floppy disks in Norwegian government
Update December 2015: This project has now ended and the floppy era is over - for me at least. The project has been featured quite a bit in the press and blogosphere. Most notably: BBC World Service (14min12sek in) CBC Spark Norwegian National Broadcasting (NRK) Dagbladet (national newspaper) While mass production of…
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Fukushima
When I visited Chernobyl 7 years ago, I didn’t think that a similar disaster could take place anywhere ever again, and certainly not in Japan.
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Bloomberg Runs on 25M lines of Fortran (2006)
One of my colleagues is ex Bloomberg. He tells me there's only one thing I need to know about them: "25 million lines of Fortran !" Apparently they have 1500 coders firefightin…
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Lost C64 Games: Daffy Duck – 1992 Hi-Tec
Cancelled & Unreleased Video Games
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Happy Birthday Monkey Island
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
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K&R C (2014)
I was recently reading the C99 rationale (because why the fuck not) and I was intrigued by some comments that certain features were retired in C89, so I started wondering what other weird features …
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Aristotle’s (apocryphal) advice to Alexander the Great on Persian elites (2013)
One of the most frequently copied and widely disseminated books in Europe from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries was the Secret of Secrets . Formally it contains advice from the great philosopher Aristotle to the world-conqueror Alexander the Great. Aristotle’s advice covers everything from Alexander’s diet…
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The origins of chroot()
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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Examining the core memory module inside a vintage IBM 1401 mainframe
The IBM 1401 mainframe computer was announced in 1959 and by the mid-1960s had become the best-selling computer , extremely popular with me...
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Why telephone keypads are arranged the way they are
Why are the push buttons on a telephone arranged the way they are?
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A Little Bit of the Manuals
Of the barrage of advice the world was prepared to give me from the vantage point of the Internet, one unique bit of advice came from a long-time collector and rescuer of older computer documentati…
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The Tomb of Queen Esther in Persia
“How much is the taxi to Khomeini Square?” “ Gheymati nadore, it does not cost anything”, the old taxi driver spreads his arms...
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A Western Kid Living in Communist Poland (2014)
In this HN thread I commented on how the story about the People’s Republic of Donetsk reminded me of my days in communist Poland.
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