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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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In the Shadow of John McCarthy
John McCarthy was a genius of the highest order. Much is known about his contribution to Lisp as its inventor, but he was also the mind behind much of early AI research, the progenitor of much of computer chess, and the initiator of time-sharing. As a Lisp advocate I have many thanks due to John McCarthy and it…
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The Demon Machine
Over the weekend I was reunited with the first two computers I spent extensive time programming. The Sharp MZ-80K (released in 1979) and t...
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Things That Turbo Pascal is Smaller Than
It's not about technology for its own sake. It's about being able to implement your ideas.
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This One Hurts: Dr. Walter Bortz on Dr. John McCarthy
John McCarthy died four days ago. He was 84. His obit in the “New York Times” made specific reference to his generally attributed parenthood of artificial intelligence. John was my good…
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Siri meets Eliza
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.
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The Roots of Lisp
(I wrote this article to help myself understand exactly what McCarthy discovered. You don't need to know this stuff to program in Lisp, but it should be helpful to anyone who wants to understand the essence of Lisp � both in the sense of its origins and its semantic core. The fact that it has such a core is one of…
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Programming Language Development: The Past 5 Years
I recently compiled a list of Perlis Languages that were meant to illustrate varying paradigms not typically found in mainstream programming languages. Those languages were meant to stretch your mind and are not necessarily representative of the state of the art in language design and implementation. In this post I…
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Prince of Persia for Commodore 64/128 released
The C64 conversion of Prince of Persia, based on the original Apple II code by Jordan Mechner has been released today. It requires a Commod...
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Bjarne Stroustrup on Dennis Ritchie: They said it couldn't be done, & he did it
What a sad week. Rob Pike reports that Dennis Ritchie also has passed away. Ritchie was one of the pioneers of computer science, and a well-deserved Turing winner for his many contributions, notabl…
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Ritchie, Stroustrup, and Gosling interview
This article appeared in Java Report, 5(7), July 2000 and C++ Report, 12(7), July/August 2000 .
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Tim Bray on Dennis Ritchie
Writing operating systems in a compiled machine-independent programming language.
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Time-zone database used by Unix shut down due to IP litigation
Today (2011-10-06), the time-zone database was closed down . It is perhaps easy to read that line, think it doesn't affect you, and then ...
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Stephen Wolfram on Steve Jobs: A Few Memories
Stephen Wolfram shares personal memories of Steve Jobs, how their paths crossed, and the support and encouragement Jobs provided over the years.
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Daring Fireball: Steve Jobs Dies
Link to: http://www.apple.com/
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Steve Jobs: 1955–2011
I didn’t know Steve. I never met him. I never worked for him. I never even got one of his famous one-liner email responses.
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Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator, Only One Month Late
In 1987, Apple released this concept video for Knowledge Navigator, a voice-based assistant combined with a touchscreen tablet computer. Based on the dates mentioned in the Knowledge Navigator video, it takes place on September 16, 2011. The date on the professor’s calendar is September 16, and he’s looking for a 2006…
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IEEE Refuses to Accept Public-Domain Papers?
It turns out that, in response to #3, IEEE is overriding its scientific referees and flat-out refusing to accept public-domain papers.
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