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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 311 posts.
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I miss Microsoft Encarta (2019)
Microsoft Encarta came out in 1993 and was one of the first CD-ROMs I had. It ...
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVb: Work Hardening, or Hardly Working?
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020107 points23 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, we close out our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production, although I ought to note that there will be at least one addendum di…
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Modernising RISC OS in 2020: is there hope for the ancient ARM OS?
The first computer I owned was a Sinclair ZX Spectrum, and I retain a lot of fondness for these tiny, cheap, severely-compromised machines. I just backed the ZX Spectrum Next kickstarter, for instance. But after I left university and got a job, I bought myself my first proper computer:…
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The Nobel Peace Prize 2020
The Nobel Peace Prize 2020 was awarded to World Food Programme (WFP) "for its efforts to combat hunger, for its contribution to bettering conditions for peace in conflict-affected areas and for acting as a driving force in efforts to prevent the use of hunger as a weapon of war and conflict"
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Part IVa: Steel Yourself
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020218 points30 commentsHistory & Retro Computing details
This week, we continue our four(and a half)-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week, we looked at how a blacksmith reshapes our iron from a spo…
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Using a Piece of Paper as a Display Terminal – Ed vs. Vim
This article will focus on discussing why the ancient text editor 'ed' works the way it does.
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The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2020 was awarded jointly to Emmanuelle Charpentier and Jennifer A. Doudna "for the development of a method for genome editing"
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The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020
The Nobel Prize in Physics 2020 was divided, one half awarded to Roger Penrose "for the discovery that black hole formation is a robust prediction of the general theory of relativity", the other half jointly to Reinhard Genzel and Andrea Ghez "for the discovery of a supermassive compact object at the centre of our…
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Cells are fast and crowded places (2011)
I recently learned that cells are extremely crowded and busy places. I knew there's a lot of activity in cells, but I didn't realize just h...
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The Whitworth Three Plates Method (2017)
A visual step-by-step guide to Joseph Whitworth’s three-plate method for creating very flat reference surfaces.
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Scottish Nitroglycerin and One Legged Stools (2014)
Main Menu - click above Man, thermometer, one legged stool & vat of nitro 1870 . Alfred Nobel chose Ardeer, in Ayreshire, as the ...
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Iron, How Did They Make It, Part III: Hammer-Time
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020175 points23 commentscited by 5History & Retro Computing details
This week, we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we took our ore and smelted it into a rough, spongy mass of iron called…
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C Programming on System 6 – Intro [video]
I've been writing an IMAP client for and on my Mac 512Ke over the past many weeks. Taking inspiration from Andreas Kling's excellent YouTube videos documenting his development of the Serenity operating system, I thought I'd start screencasting some of my work.
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Industrial Literacy
When you know these facts of history, you understand what “industrial civilization” is and why it is the benefactor of everyone who is lucky enough to live in it
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It used to be simpler to teach Unix
When I began teaching Unix around anno 1986, the Unix ls(1) utility printed a list of files to stdout, one per line. It was trivial to explain the concept of not requiring a program which tells you...
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Last Phase of the Desktop Wars?
The two most intriguing developments in the recent evolution of the Microsoft Windows operating system are Windows System for Linux (WSL) and the porting of their Microsoft Edge browser to Ubuntu.
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Reverse engineering a Hit Clip (2013)
It’s hard to see a child outside today without some kind of iDevice pumping high fidelity 192kbps stereo lossless audio into their shiny white headphones, but BACK IN MY DAY, the iPod hadn’t been invented yet. Pickings were slim. Walkmen were outdated, CD players were pricey and would skip if bumped around despite…
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Debian 10.6
[05 Dec 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.7 released [26 Sep 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.6 released [30 Aug 2020] DebConf20 online closes [01 Aug 2020] Updated Debian 10: 10.5 released [18 Jul 2020] Updated Debian 9: 9.13 released [09 Jul 2020] Debian 8 Long Term Support reaching end-of-life [16 Jun 2020] Ampere donates…
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part II
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020263 points74 commentscited by 10History & Retro Computing details
This week we continue our four-part (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) look at pre-modern iron and steel production. Last week we prospected our iron ore and extracted it from the ground and did some…
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Really Atari ST?
This blog has previously examined a very very strange code fragment in the BIOS module of DOS. To recap, when deciding whether a boot sector might have a valid BPB, DOS checks whether the first byte is a relative jump (opcode E9h) or a short jump (opcode EBh), both used by different DOS versions. But it also checks…
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X-COM
X-COM seemed to come out of nowhere. Its release was not preceded by an enormous marketing campaign with an enormous amount of hype. It had no video demo playing in the front window of Babbages, it wasn’t advertised twelve months in advance on glossy foldout magazine inserts, it had no flashing point-of-purchase…
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How to catch a spy that is using a numbers station – The KGB Experience
From 2019 on, the Latvian National Archive offers access to various KGB documents.The Archive digitized operation cases and also special KGB training manuals.
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Iron, How Did They Make It? Part I, Mining
Bret Devereaux (A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry)2020272 points68 commentscited by 20History & Retro Computing details
This week we are starting a four-part look (I, II, III, IVa, IVb, addendum) at pre-modern iron and steel production. As with our series on farming, we are going to follow the train of iron producti…
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Reverse-engineering the first FPGA chip, the XC2064
A Field-Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) can implement arbitrary digital logic, anything from a microprocessor to a video generator or crypt...