31
New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 337 posts.
32
The Secret History of ATAPI
The other day I asked myself a seemingly trivial question: What was the first ATAPI CD-ROM drive and when was it available? Given that ATAPI was a major technology which instantly obsoleted all proprietary CD-ROM interfaces and made SCSI much less desirable, one might expect that there would have been some press…
33
The Further Text Adventures of Scott Adams
The man who invented the interactive fiction genre talks about its past and future.
34
Why V7 Unix matters so much
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…
35
The Scranton Iron Furnaces
The remains of four iron furnaces, operated by the Lackawanna Iron Works, are located in Scranton, Pennsylvania.
36
Surely you're joking, Comrade Beria
The Rosatom historical website has an entire section devoted to "Atomic Fun" — jokes and stories from the Soviet nuclear program. It's... something.
37
The Spiral Staircase Myth (2020)
21 November 2020 The story goes that all spiral* staircases in castles turn clockwise so that primarily right-handed defenders, fighting downwards, would have an advantage over attackers whose weapon would be impeded by the newel post. It is a particular favourite of tour guides, appears in castle guidebooks (Hodgson…
38
Office 2000 is good to go
The biggest competition for Office 2000 was…Office 97. –Realization at the end of the project
39
40
Reverse-engineering the Yamaha DX7 synthesizer's sound chip from die photos
The Yamaha DX7 digital synthesizer was released in 1983 and became "one of the most important advances in the history of modern popular mu...
41
How many people have Q Clearance?
Ever wonder how many people currently have the enigmatic Q Clearance, the required security clearance for access to nuclear secrets? Well, I found out.
42
Jimmy Wales’ Final Email
Jimmy Wales, the founder of Wikipedia, is emailing me? “Signing off”? Is he leaving Wikipedia? Is he dying?! No, just asking for more…
43
Shooting an Elephant (1936)
"[…] it was at this moment, as I stood there with the rifle in my hands, that I first grasped the hollowness, the futility of the white man's dominion in the East."
44
45
46
When Radiohead sampled Paul Lansky (2000)
The English rock band Radiohead uses a sample from my very first computer piece, mild und leise , (this is an mp3 file) on one of the tracks on their CD, Kid A . (Yes, they very graciously asked permission, and I gave it. ) In fact, I really like what they did with the sample; it is quite imaginative and inventive…
47
A 1958 UNIVAC airline reservation system
I had thought that SABRE, a joint development of IBM and American Airlines, was the first computerized airline reservation system, going live in 1960. However, “The Univac Air […]
48
The Soviet 1801VM2 LSI-11 Processor
The Soviet-made 1801VM2 CPU (a binary-compatible implementation of the PDP11 instruction set and QBUS interface) was developed in 1982. The 1801VM2 is a further development of the earlier 1801VM1 doubling the original 5MHz clock speed. From a constructive standpoint this CPU is a completely independent development.
49
Fuck.com (1997)
Since then the Internet has grown by literally hundreds of thousands of percentage points, people have been busted big time for online obscenity - folks at InterNIC have become more cautious.
50
An oral history of Bank Python
The strange world of Python, as used by big investment banks
51
Fortification, Part I: The Besieger’s Playbook
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2021119 points14 commentscited by 3History & Retro Computing details
This is the first part of a planned five-part series (I, II, III, IV, V) covering some of the basics of fortifications, from city walls to castles and field fortifications! We are going to discuss …
52
53
The Common Desktop Environment (CDE) in 2021
Published: 28-01-2021 | Author: Remy van Elst | Text only version of this article
54
SPARCbook 3000ST: The coolest 90s laptop (2019)
My personal website and blog
55
Live Not by Lies (1974)
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's immortal 1974 essay calling for civic courage.
56
Pentium on a 386 Motherboard
I was wondering what would be the ultimate upgrade for my 386 motherboard. It has a soldered-in 386 CPU, an unpopulated 386 PGA socket, and a socket for either a 387 FPU or a 486 PGA. It might even be compatible with a Weitek processor, though I’m not entirely certain. There’s also a possibility that it has a…
57
An Interview with the Old Man of Floating-Point (1998)
This interview underlies an abbreviated version to appear in the March 1998 issue of IEEE Computer .
58
Unusual Locomotives
The Douglas Self Site, steam locomotive, Shay, Climax, Mallet, Garratt, Turbomotive, Reid-Ramsey
59
OpenBSD: How it all started
OpenBSD remains a crucial yet largely unacknowledged player in the open-source field.
60
A Brief History & Ethos of the Digital Garden
A newly revived philosophy for publishing personal knowledge on the web