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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 390 posts.
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part III: Things
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022225 points62 commentscited by 8History & Retro Computing details
This is the third and final part (I, II, III) of our series tackling the complicated and still debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In our first part, we lo…
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SNES Development Part 1: Getting Started
I fell down the rabbit hole making a homebrew SNES game a few days ago, and since I couldn't find many good resources, I figured I'd write something of a tutorial.
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A look inside the chips that powered the landmark Polaroid SX-70 instant camera
The revolutionary Polaroid SX-70 1 camera (1972) was a marvel of engineering: the world's first instant SLR camera. This iconic camera wa...
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10 Years of Nukemap
NUKEMAP was released into the world a decade ago, believe it or not.
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CR+LF Has a Long History
The ASR33, like most teletypes of the era, works at a fixed rate. It does 10 characters per second. It is 110 Baud, using 1 start, 8 data (i...
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Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part 6: the control registers
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
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Ten Years of ThinkPadding
I’m the author of the title picture, and these are my ThinkPads. I’ve been very loyal to the ThinkPad brand for more than a decade. Until Lenovo sold me a lemon — ThinkPad X13 AMD. That event encouraged me to reflect on my loyalty. Which I did, and now I’m happy to share the results.
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Frank Rosenblatt's perceptron paved the way for AI 60 years too soon (2019)
As the Faculty of Computing and Information Science celebrates its 20th year, Frank Rosenblatt’s prescient research into artificial intelligence underscores Cornell’s pivotal role in computing history.
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How Japan saved Tokyo's rail network from collapse (part 1, 1945-1982)
The most consequential project in postwar Japanese rail history (not named Shinkansen)
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Yamaha DX7 chip reverse-engineering, part V: the output circuitry
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer (1983) was the classic synthesizer in 1980s pop music. It uses a technique called FM synthesis to produ...
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Why are semi trucks in the US and Europe so different? (2018)
American and European semi-trucks are very different. You don‘t have to be a truck enthusiast or have brilliant understanding of the mechanical part of these machines to see that semi-trucks used in USA and Europe look very different. But why? Why different ideas about what the truck should look like prevailed in…
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Predicting the tide with an analog computer made from Lego
Didn't you ever wish your<br>computer understood you?
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Origin of the Bluetooth Name
About Us We all recognize the “Bluetooth” brand, but we take for granted its significance and how much it impacts our lives. From smartphones to headphones and beyond, we rely on Bluetooth technology…
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A short introduction to the undeciphered Aegean writing systems
Every so often a news article will make the rounds of the internet – or, for that matter, a paper will be published in an academic journal – presenting a new ‘decipherment’ …
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Hardy, Ramanujan and Taxi No. 1729
In his book Ramanujan: Twelve Lectures on Subjects Suggested by His Life and Work, G. H. Hardy tells this famous story: He could remember the idiosyncracies of numbers in an almost uncanny way. It …
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The Battle of Helm’s Deep, Part I: Bargaining for Goods at Helm’s Gate
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022133 points61 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the long-awaited first part of a series (I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII. VIII) taking a historian’s look at the Battle of Helm’s Deep from both J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Two Towers…
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Latin as she is spoke: How classicists tricked themselves (2019)
How Classicists tricked themselves into not learning Latin well.
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Rome: Decline and Fall? Part II: Institutions
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2022225 points82 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This is the second of a three part (I, II, III) series tackling the complicated and still very much debated question of ‘how bad was the fall of Rome (in the West)?’ In the last part, w…
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Evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages
This tree diagram traces the evolution of the elephant depiction throughout the middle ages up to the age of enlightenment.
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The Banality of Genius: Notes on Peter Jackson's Get Back
A Special Edition of The Ruffian
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The Smart Modem
I think I've mentioned occasionally that various devices, mostly cellular modems, just use the Hayes or AT command set. Recently I obtained a GPS tracking device (made by Queclink) that is, interestingly, fully configured via the Hayes command set. It's an example of a somewhat newer trend of converging the…
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If Looks Could Kill
by Leonard Tramiel At one of the many computer trade shows over the years I had a really funny interaction with Bill Gates. I was doing demo...
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How much did a tunic cost in the Roman Empire? (2021)
If this isn't the famous robbery scene, from Arsenal MS. 5070 Boccaccio Decameron its as close as I can bother to get for a...
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How the Soviets put a lander on Venus
Surviving Hell
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Simulating the IBM 360/50 mainframe from its microcode
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. System/360 was an extremely risky "bet-t...
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Reverse engineering the 1988 NeXT keyboard protocol
Summary : Steve Jobs's NeXT computer company made a keyboard in 1988. With no prior electronics experience, I tried to get it to work over USB. To do so, I had to go way deeper than I ever expected - all the way back over 100 years to broadcast radio standards from the 1920s. I learned tons and tons, and had a lot of…
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Silicon die teardown: a look inside an early 555 timer chip
If you've played around with electronic circuits, you probably know the 555 timer integrated circuit, 1 said to be the world's best-selli...