The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
Back in the good old days-- the "Golden Era" of computers-- it was easy to separate the men from the boys (sometimes called "Real Men" and "Quiche Eaters" in the literature). During this period, the Real Men were the ones who understood computer programming, and the Quiche Eaters were the ones who didn't. A real…
The ECMA committee is working hard on designing the next version of JavaScript, also known as " Harmony ". It is due by the end of next year...
Back to: I had a blog entry for you, but I eated it | Forward to: Beer, Boston (and books)
As a child I'd made a crystal radio set and had been meaning to make one again when I came across stories of foxhole or PoW radios made f...
There's been a petition to the government and an Early Day Motion asking for Alan Turing to be pardoned. This is something I oppose desp...
We know what Unix's future used to look like. It was designed by the research group at Bell Labs that built Unix and called ‘Plan 9 from Bell Labs’. [ 154 ] Plan 9 was an attempt to do Unix over again, better.
Lest you think that this is a fluke that was quickly corrected, here is the /bin/true program from AT&T's Sys/V libraries as of 1990:
[ Update, Feb 2014. Plaque placed outside room where web was invented.] Success (of sorts)! ARS Electronica have given an award to Tim Berners-Lee and CERN for the invention of the web. They had he…
1801 - Joseph Marie Jacquard uses punch cards to instruct a loom to weave "hello, world" into a tapestry. Redditers of the time are not imp...
Quick note: Though you may have read about this property before, most articles have simply reprinted the same stock real estate photos over and over. As always, all pictures are my own work, and I don’t think you’ll find a tour like this anywhere else.
My fourth book.
Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked “ When the compiler encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly out of your nose…
One of my heroes has always been Van Jacobson. His 1988 paper on solving TCP congestion is an enjoyable read, with cross-discipline appeal. The history of all this is fascinating, such as congestio…
I picked up a children's picture book at the local library recently. Some of you might be thinking, "Why would you take out a Japanese picture book ? Are your Japanese language skills that atrophied?" Well, this happened to be a very special book, because it showed kids how Nintendo games are made, from start to…
Dr. Drang (And now it's all this)2011231 points97 commentscited by 30History & Retro Computing details
Another great post
Ever since MacOS 10.0 was released, text fields have supported Emacs bindings for the single-character Control commands, showing that there were people inside Apple (and, presumably, NeXT) who were right-thinking and sensible. But some time late in the 10.6 release cycle, and continuing into 10.7.1, the binding for…
I realized recently that while I have written about the history of the about:authors URL , I have never explained the history of the about:jwz easter egg . Well, I guess it's been long enough, so now it can be told.
I had the pleasure of catching the opening night showing of Robert X. Cringely's rediscovered TV interview with Steve Jobs in 1995. In the interview Steve mused...
It was the familiar story of human cruelty and greed: the sperm whales were hunted to the oblivion. Then, in the 1970s, the better part of humanity led by good people - ecological activists - saw the error of their ways and stopped the murder. Good triumphed over evil. Amen. The problem with such…
When I was in high school I didn’t own a computer. I used to read the occasional Popular Mechanics magazine and would linger for a while on the articles about the internet or HTML, fascinated by this new technology that I had barely even used. I don’t know why, but for some reason I’ve always been drawn toward…
The day before I submitted this column, news hit the net that the other shoe had finally dropped. After months of waiting and wondering what was to become of Be, we learned that Palm, Inc. will be purchasing Be's technology, intellectual property, and assets. While we don't yet know exactly what Palm plans to do with…
Milton Friedman? William Aberhart? Walter Augustus Wyckoff? Unemployed Worker? Businessman in China? UK Minister of Agriculture?
Question for Quote Investigator: The gyrations of financial markets can be startling. You may have unassailable information indicating that a stock is overpriced or underpriced, but you can still lose money because the market price may not accurately reflect the underlying verities for years. Here is a pertinent adage:
