721
Setelinleikkaus: When Finns snipped their cash in half to curb inflation
On the last day of 1945, with World War II finally behind it, Finland's government announced a new and very strange policy. All Finns were r...
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The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 4,253 posts.
History & Retro Computing
Any year
722
Prayer, Placement, and Absolution: Peter Hristoff on Islamic Prayer Rugs (2015)
Artist in Residence Peter Hristoff meditates on the role of Islamic prayer rugs (seccades) and the role they play in his own creative output.
723
Institutional memory and reverse smuggling (2011)
Institutional memory comes in two forms: people and documentation. People remember how things work and why. Sometimes they write it down and store that information somewhere. Institutional amnesia works similarly. The people leave and the documents disappear, rot, or just become forgotten (as it were).
724
It's a bird, it's a plane, it's Super Cassette Vision
The Epoch Cassette Vision was a moderate success. But in 1983, that all ended, when Nintendo and Sega released new consoles, which had more advanced hardware...
725
Evidence of oldest known alphabetic writing unearthed in ancient Syrian city
Findings suggest alphabetic writing may be some 500 years older than other discoveries
726
Revisiting the DOS Memory Models
At the beginning of the year, I wrote a bunch of articles on the various tricks DOS played to overcome the tight memory limits of x86’s real mode. There was one question that came up and remained unanswered: what were the various “models” that the compilers of the day offered?
727
FaSTer: Atari ST Digital Magazine
A magazine on a floppy from 1986.
728
729
The meme-ification of the “Demon Core”
The strange transformation of a criticality accident into dark Internet humor
730
731
20 years of Google Scholar
Google Scholar celebrates two decades of breaking down barriers to academic research and making it accessible to everyone, everywhere.
732
Why did Windows 95 setup use three operating systems?
Simplifying the problem to an earlier problem.
733
The Battle Line at Louvain
“Where they burn books, they will also burn people” — Heinrich Heine
734
Thomas E. Kurtz has died
CHM remembers the remarkable career and contributions of 2023 Fellow Thomas E. Kurtz, who passed away on November 12, 2024.
735
The Impact of Jungle Music in 90s Video Game Development
Jungle music was found in countless games from the early 90s. This article goes over what jungle is, where it comes from, and why it was the perfect match for PlayStation & Nintendo 64 games.
736
The Soul of an Old Machine: Revisiting the Timeless von Neumann Architecture
Revisiting the timeless von Neumann Architecture
737
Steve Jobs, NeXTSTEP, and early object-oriented programming (2016)
Since 2008, over a hundred billion apps have been downloaded from Apple’s App Store onto users’ iPhones or iPads. However, the technology and tools powering the mobile “app revolution” are not themselves new, but rather have a long history spanning over thirty years, one which connects back to the beginnings of…
738
Visualizing World War II
If you’ve been reading this blog for any length of time, you’ll know that maps and history are two of my favorite things. I love history because I love learning about the vast panoply of the human …
739
Testing the Z80 Chip with a 1970s Beauty
The Fairchild Sentry 610 was optimized for engineers
740
741
The Internet Gopher from Minnesota
Structured Text on the Internet before the World Wide Web
742
743
Grim Fandango
My one big regret was the PlayStation version [of Broken Sword] . No one thought it would sell, so we kept it like the PC version. In hindsight, I think if we had introduced direct control in this game, it would have been enormous.
744
A mistake that killed Japan's software industry? (2023)
This is our 200th episode, so I wanted to do something special. Everyone loves to complain about the poor quality of Japanese software, but today I’m going to explain exactly what went wrong. You'll get the whole story, and I'll also pinpoint the specific moment Japan lost its way. By the end, I think you'll
745
New Acquisitions: 1933 and the Definition of Fascism
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2024cited by 14History & Retro Computing details
Today we’re going to look at definitions of fascism and ask the question – you may have guessed – if Donald Trump is running for President as a fascist. Worry not, this isn’…
746
Alonzo Church: Architect of computer intelligence
The man who gave us the solution to the Entscheidungsproblem
747
The history of Unix's ioctl and signal about window sizes
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…
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Claude Shannon: Mathematician, engineer, genius and juggler (2017)
By Rob Goodman and Jimmy Soni, co-authors A MIND AT PLAY: How Claude Shannon Invented the Information Age “Do you mind if I hang you upside down by your legs?” From any other professor, this question might have elicited concern. But from Claude Shannon, it was par for the course. Shannon had in mind an elaborate…
750
The rise of the U.S., the rise of China
I spend a lot of time reading about manufacturing and its evolution, which means I end up repeatedly reading about the times and places where radical changes in manufacturing were taking place: Britain in the late 18th century, the US in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Japan in the second half of the 20th…