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The button that isn’t
Is there a big red button that can launch nuclear war? No — but thinking about why there isn't is a nice way into the complexities of command and control issues.
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
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Why Perl Didn't Win
Perl used to be everywhere. Its fall from grace wasn't inevitable. Here's how it could have been prevented.
3514
Microsoft BASIC for 6502 – Original Source Code (1978)
This is the original 1978 source code of Microsoft BASIC for 6502 with all original comments, documentation and easter eggs: M6502.MAC (1978-07-27, 6955 lines, 161,685 bytes) This is currently the oldest publicly available piece of source written by Bill Gates.
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The best ping story I've ever heard
Yes, it's true! I'm the author of ping for UNIX. Ping is a little thousand-line hack that I wrote in an evening which practically everyone seems to know about. :-)
3517
Notes on Red Star OS 3.0
How to navigate North Korea's home-grown Linux distribution.
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The truth about C and Unix history
My homepage for projects, jokes and bunnies.
3519
The MS-DOS Showcase
2,400 MS-DOS games and programs have gone live on the Internet Archive. The full collection is here and the games-specific section (basically all of them, for now) is here. But wait before you clic…
3520
The Man Who Invented Scotch Tape
How a scrappy "misfit" engineer with no college education revolutionized the world of tape.
3521
Classic NES Series Anti-Emulation Measures
Some of you may remember a series of peculiar Game Boy Advance games that came out over the course of 2004. In stark contrast with the usual dark grey cartridges with colorful labels, a set of light grey cartridges with simple labels were released containing games ported from the original Nintendo Entertainment…
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Each New Boot a Miracle – DOSBOX in the Browser
This week, we got the emulation of MS-DOS programs (mostly) working on the Internet Archive. Up to now, every single emulated system has been via the JSMESS project, which supports well over 600 sy…
3523
A Spaniard in Samarkand, 1404 (2012)
Special note: an earlier version of this post appeared on a new blog I helped develop in partnership with Not Even Past of the Univer...
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Jordan Mechner
Jordan Mechner is an author, graphic novelist, screenwriter and video game designer, best known as the creator of Prince of Persia. Follow his latest projects here.
3526
Hyphen Hate? When Amazon went to war against punctuation
This is a really strange blog post to have to write, simply because the situation is absurd. It would be comedic, really, if the situation was not costing me money and resulted in one of my best-se…
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Flying with Machine Guns?
Dynamics of shooting machine guns downwards, and the actual forces, velocities and heights that could be achieved. Modeled with Wolfram SystemModeler.
3530
The Infamous Windows “Hello World” Program
A recent blog post by consultant John Cook reminded everybody about the infamous “Hello World” programs in the early chapters of the first five editions of Programming Windows:
3531
Zusie – My Relay Computer
The story behind Zusie begins in May 2008, when I went on vacation to Berlin for a few days with a friend. As is my habit, I looked for interesting technical or scientific sites to visit, and the main thing to visit was the Technische Museum. I think I spent a full day day there, to the expressed dismay of my friend…
3532
A Japanese-based multinational made a CD-based console once
Even today, plenty of disinformation still abounds regarding the WIZ code. A 22.050Khz wobble that was used to identify legitimate CD's. Maybe one day we'll put them to rest... :)
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How medieval astronomers made trig tables
Clever tricks used by medieval astronomers to tabulate sines at every degree, before calculators and before calculus.
3536
Ten Years of World of Warcraft
WoW has always been a contradiction of sorts: not the pioneer, but the one that solidified the pattern. Not the experimenter, but the one that reaped the rewards. Not the innovator, but the one that was well-designed, built solidly, and made appealing. It was the MMO that took what has always been there, and delivered…
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Grumpy Gamer – SCUMM Notes from the C64
Ron Gilbert's often incoherent and bitter ramblings about the Game Industry
3538
The Generalist – On Alexander Grothendieck
I never met Alexander Grothendieck. I was never in the same room with him. I never even saw him from a distance. But whenever I think about math — which is to say, pretty much every day ̵…
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FBI's "Suicide Letter" to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Dangers of Unchecked Surveillance
The New York Times has published an unredacted version of the famous “suicide letter” from the FBI to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The letter, recently discovered by historian and professor Beverly Gage, is a disturbing document. But it’s also something that everyone in the United States should read...
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The Invention of Sliced Bread
Sliced bread: the greatest thing since...sliced bread.